用生成模型实现高效降水概率预报,超越主流业务系统。
SimCast-S2S: An Efficient Generative Model for Subseasonal Precipitation Forecasting via Transfer Learning from Climate Simulations

- 在隐空间中用扩散模型生成概率预报,提升效率与不确定性建模能力。
- 仅用部分气象变量和少量再分析数据,仍超越ECMWF等主流系统。
- 通过气候模拟预训练+低秩适配,解决数据少难训练难题,适合气候预测研究者。
次季节至季节(S2S)降水预报对经济社会有重大影响,但因信号弱、不确定性高及计算成本大而难以实现。本文提出SimCast-S2S,一种基于变分自编码器隐空间的生成式扩散框架,用于概率性S2S降水预报。该方法首次将扩散生成管道应用于S2S预测,可有效从条件分布中采样;通过在紧凑隐空间生成大规模概率集合,显著降低计算开销;并利用气候模拟数据预训练结合低秩适配(LoRA)技术,在有限再分析数据上完成微调。在再分析数据上,该模型优于卷积神经网络和U-Net等深度学习基线。尽管仅使用部分大气变量且无后处理或校准,其性能仍可媲美甚至超过如ECMWF-S2S等先进业务系统,表明隐空间生成建模与模拟到再分析迁移学习是高效、可扩展的数据驱动概率预报新路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) precipitation forecasting has substantial financial and societal impact, yet remains challenging because of weak predictive signals, high associated uncertainty, and the computational cost of operational systems, which constrains simulation fidelity. We introduce SimCast-S2S, a generative latent-diffusion framework for probabilistic S2S precipitation forecasting that addresses three major bottlenecks in data-driven prediction. First, because S2S prediction requires uncertainty quantification rather than only deterministic point forecasts, SimCast-S2S is the first data-driven system that uses a diffusion-based generative pipeline for S2S prediction, enabling effective sampling from the underlying conditional distribution. Second, since generating large probabilistic ensembles is computationally costly in physical space, SimCast-S2S instead operates in a compact latent space learned by variational autoencoders, enabling efficient large-ensemble generation. Third, diffusion models typically require large training datasets; SimCast-S2S overcomes this via transfer learning with low-rank adaptation (LoRA), pretraining on large ensembles of climate simulations before fine-tuning on limited reanalysis data. On reanalysis data, SimCast-S2S outperforms deep learning baselines, including convolutional neural networks and U-Net architectures. Notably, despite using only a subset of atmospheric input variables and no post-processing, bias correction, or calibration, SimCast-S2S remains competitive with, and in many cases outperforms, state-of-the-art operational systems such as the ECMWF-S2S baseline. These results indicate that latent generative modeling combined with simulation-to-reanalysis transfer learning offers an efficient and scalable path toward data-driven probabilistic S2S precipitation forecasting.
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