# Probabilistic bias adjustment of seasonal forecasts using generative machine learning: A case study of Arctic sea ice predictions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29172/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [A Generative Deep Learning Approach to Stochastic Downscaling of Precipitation Forecasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02028/) (2022)
- [Skillful joint probabilistic weather forecasting from marginals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10772/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Post-Processing Ensemble Weather Forecasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08748/) (2020)
- [Structured Uncertainty Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07079/) (2018)
- [Samudra: An AI Global Ocean Emulator for Climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03795/) (2024)
- [Proper scoring rules for estimation and forecast evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01781/) (2025)
- [Capturing Climatic Variability: Using Deep Learning for Stochastic Downscaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02587/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of Machine Learning Techniques for Forecast Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14844/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling for Atmospheric Convection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01444/) (2020)
- [Towards diffusion models for large-scale sea-ice modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18417/) (2024)
- [Probabilistic bias adjustment of seasonal predictions of Arctic Sea Ice Concentration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09891/) (2025)
- [VAEneu: A New Avenue for VAE Application on Probabilistic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04252/) (2024)
- [Toward generative machine learning for boosting ensembles of climate simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06287/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Seasonal climate predictions support planning and risk management by offering early information of the most likely-to-occur climate conditions in the coming months, and associated uncertainties. Ensemble forecasts enable this by simulating many plausible outcomes, allowing predictions to be expressed as usable probabilities. Large ensembles and high-resolution forecasts strengthen this guidance by better sampling uncertainty and capturing finer-scale processes but come with significant computational cost. Moreover, forecast ensembles drift and exhibit systematic biases and spatio-temporal errors that grow with lead time, requiring careful post-processing and calibration. A probabilistic post-processing framework based on conditional Variational Autoencoders (cVAEs) was developed at the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis to generate large ensembles of bias adjusted seasonal predictions of Arctic sea ice. The generative model was designed to learn the observational distribution conditioned on the biased model prediction. This enables generation of arbitrarily large ensembles of well-calibrated, bias corrected forecasts with improved skill. Here, we extend this framework to address the loss of fine-scale energy and the characteristic blurriness in predictions, a known limitation of standard cVAEs. Specifically, we employ a generator in place of the Gaussian parametrized decoder in the cVAE and use Continuous Ranked Probability Score in the objective function instead of the Mean Square Error. We further use a higher resolution target dataset compared to the raw forecast. We show that the adjusted forecasts are better calibrated, more consistent with the observational distribution, and exhibit smaller errors than benchmark predictions, while also enhancing the resolution of the raw forecasts and improving sharpness and spectral power relative to the standard cVAE.