Towards High Resolution Probabilistic Coastal Inundation Forecasting from Sparse Observations

Coastal flooding poses increasing threats to communities worldwide, necessitating accurate and hyper-local inundation forecasting for effective emergency response. However, real-world deployment of forecasting systems is often constrained by sparse sensor networks, where only a limited subset of locations may have sensors due to budget constraints. To approach this challenge, we present DIFF -SPARSE, a masked conditional diffusion model designed for probabilistic coastal inundation forecasting from sparse sensor observations. DIFF -SPARSE primarily utilizes the inundation history of a location and its neighboring locations from a context time window as spatiotemporal context. The fundamental challenge of spatiotemporal prediction based on sparse observations in the context window is addressed by introducing a novel masking strategy during training. Digital elevation data and temporal co-variates are utilized as additional spatial and temporal contexts, respectively. A convolutional neural network and a conditional UNet architecture with cross-attention mechanism are employed to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics in the data. We trained and tested DIFF -SPARSE on coastal inundation data from the Eastern Shore of Virginia and systematically assessed the performance of DIFF -SPARSE across different sparsity levels 0%, 50%, 95% missing observations. Our experiment results show that DIFF -SPARSE achieves upto 62% improvement in terms of two forecasting performance metrics compared to existing methods, at 95% sparsity level. Moreover, our ablation studies reveal that digital elevation data becomes more useful at high sparsity levels compared to temporal co-variates.