Conditional Flow Matching for Probabilistic Downscaling of Maximum 3-day Snowfall in Alaska
On the map: Diffusion models → Flow matching, time series and science
Abstract (arXiv)
Precipitation in complex terrain is governed by orographic processes operating at scales of a few kilometers, yet climate models typically run at resolutions of 50--100~km where this topographic detail is absent. Dynamical downscaling with high-resolution regional models such as WRF can resolve these processes, but the computational cost -- months of wall-clock time per scenario -- precludes the large ensembles needed for uncertainty quantification. We present WxFlow, a conditional generative model based on flow matching that learns to map coarse-resolution climate model output and high-resolution topography to calibrated probabilistic ensembles of fine-scale precipitation fields. Applied to 4~km WRF simulations of maximum 3-day snowfall over southeast Alaska, WxFlow achieves 87.8% improvement in spectral fidelity and dramatically lower Continuous Ranked Probability Scores relative to conventional lapse-rate-corrected bicubic downscaling, while generating 50-member ensembles in seconds on a laptop. Ensemble spread is spatially coherent and governed by topography, reflecting physically plausible uncertainty structure. All code is available at https://github.com/glide-ism/wrf-flow.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 7 of its 11 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2026.
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7 of 11 references.
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- 2024Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling20 Aug
- 2023Residual Corrective Diffusion Modeling for Km-scale Atmospheric Downscaling24 Sep
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modeling6 Oct
Other references · 4
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- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,952
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,656
- 2018Neural Ordinary Differential Equationscited by 3,750
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