# Urban Air Temperature Prediction using Conditional Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13504/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05034/) (2022)
- [SinSR: Diffusion-Based Image Super-Resolution in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14760/) (2023)
- [Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12469/) (2023)
- [DiffusionSat: A Generative Foundation Model for Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03606/) (2023)
- [Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14303/) (2023)
- [Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08291/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Story: Visual Memory Conditioned Consistent Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13319/) (2022)
- [Iterative α-(de)Blending: a Minimalist Deterministic Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03486/) (2023)
- [Adaptively-Realistic Image Generation from Stroke and Sketch with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12675/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Generalizable Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18832/) (2023)
- [Machine Learning Framework for High-Resolution Air Temperature Downscaling Using LiDAR-Derived Urban Morphological Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02120/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urbanization as a global trend has led to many environmental challenges, including the urban heat island (UHI) effect. The increase in temperature has a significant impact on the well-being of urban residents. Air temperature (Ta) at 2m above the surface is a key indicator of the UHI effect. How land use land cover (LULC) affects Ta is a critical research question which requires high-resolution (HR) Ta data at neighborhood scale. However, weather stations providing Ta measurements are sparsely distributed e.g. more than 10km apart; and numerical models are impractically slow and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel method to predict HR Ta at 100m ground separation distance (gsd) using land surface temperature (LST) and other LULC related features which can be easily obtained from satellite imagery. Our method leverages diffusion models for the first time to generate accurate and visually realistic HR Ta maps, which outperforms prior methods. We pave the way for meteorological research using computer vision techniques by providing a dataset of an extended spatial and temporal coverage, and a high spatial resolution as a benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we show that our model can be applied to urban planning by simulating the impact of different urban designs on Ta.