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Record W4415503615 · doi:10.1029/2025jh000678

Generative Adversarial Networks for Downscaling Hourly Precipitation in the Canadian Prairies

2025· article· en· W4415503615 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Geophysical Research Machine Learning and Computation · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicMeteorological Phenomena and Simulations
Canadian institutionsBGC Engineering (Canada)University of Calgary
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMitacs
KeywordsDownscalingClimate modelPrecipitationBenchmark (surveying)Climate changeKey (lock)FidelitySpatial ecologyCoupled model intercomparison projectAdversarial system

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Developing robust downscaling methods is essential for maximizing the applicability of climate model outputs in engineering design and climate mitigation, particularly in a changing climate. This study evaluates four deep learning model configurations for downscaling, focusing on their structure, functionality, and ability to capture localized convective events in the Canadian prairies. These model configurations aim to downscale coarse‐resolution climate model outputs (∼200 km) to the finer spatial resolution of regional climate models (∼50 km) for hourly precipitation. We introduce advanced metrics to assess the fidelity of precipitation downscaling, examining both marginal statistics and spatiotemporal dependencies. A U‐Network (UNET) captures spatial and temporal dependencies efficiently while three generative adversarial networks (GANs) configurations incorporate a critic network to enhance the realism of generated fields. The study also evaluates the effects of a thresholding layer to constrain precipitation values and a convolution long short‐term memory layer in the GAN critic to better capture temporal dependencies. Results show that all four model configurations effectively capture spatial dependencies, with the simplest GAN architecture outperforming others in preserving temporal dependencies. Latitudinal correlations are better preserved than longitudinal across all models. While UNET produces overly smoothed fields, GANs generate more detailed outputs when downscaling Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 projections. By optimizing deep learning models for this region, the study provides key insights into future precipitation trends, enabling the identification of localized storms. These findings are critical for improving infrastructure resilience across catchments in the prairies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.264
Threshold uncertainty score0.978

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.351
Teacher spread0.308 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it