Towards the development of an AI-based early warning system: a deep learning approach to bias correct and downscale seasonal climate forecasts

Early warning systems protect and support lives, jobs, land and infrastructure. DAKI-FWS, a German national project, aims at developing an early warning system to protect the German society and economy against extreme weather and climate events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves. With a seasonal temporal horizon, DAKI-FWS requires high resolution and bias corrected seasonal forecast of daily minimum and maximum temperatures, daily precipitation and wind speed. To derive such information, we have developed a deep neural network (DNN) approach to downscale and bias correct coarse resolution seasonal forecast ensembles on a 1 degree grid to a 1 arc minute grid.

The proposed DNN approach is here analyzed and compared with other machine learning approaches. Results show that such a deep learning technique can generate realistic, temporally consistent, and high-resolution climate information. The statistical and physical properties of the generated ensembles are analyzed using spatial correlation, cross validation and SVD. The DNN predicts extreme values that are very close to the observed values while preserving the physical relationships in the system as well as the trends in the variables.