# Multimodal Spatiotemporal Atmospheric Data Assimilation with Latent Video Flow-matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05103/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 20 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

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- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
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- [Guidance with Spherical Gaussian Constraint for Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03201/) (2024)
- [DiffDA: a Diffusion Model for Weather-scale Data Assimilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05932/) (2024)
- [GraphDOP: Towards skilful data-driven medium-range weather forecasts learnt and initialised directly from observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15687/) (2024)
- [Generative Diffusion-based Downscaling for Climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17752/) (2024)
- [Appa: Bending Weather Dynamics with Latent Diffusion Models for Global Data Assimilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18720/) (2025)
- [Ensemble score filter with image inpainting for data assimilation in tracking surface quasi-geostrophic dynamics with partial observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12419/) (2025)
- [PhyDA: Physics-Guided Diffusion Models for Data Assimilation in Atmospheric Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12882/) (2025)
- [Physics-Informed CNNs for Super-Resolution of Sparse Observations on Dynamical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17319/) (2022)
- [Generative assimilation and prediction for weather and climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03038/) (2025)
- [STeP: A Framework for Solving Scientific Video Inverse Problems with Spatiotemporal Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07549/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data assimilation (DA) uses Bayesian inference to update the state of a numerical forecast model with observed data. In this study, we propose a fundamentally different, unified approach to atmospheric data assimilation. We use latent video flow-matching to sample temporally consistent trajectories from a prior trained using ERA5 reanalysis (69 variables over an 8-day window). We also use posterior sampling to assimilate real observation sources, such as those from the NOAA Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive and the Integrated Surface Database. Because the prior generates a continuous trajectory, it naturally propagates information between observed and unobserved frames. Therefore, we can perform various DA tasks, such as filtering and smoothing, simply by changing the observed frames. Moreover, we generate full-state ensemble forecasts directly from sparse observations, achieving performance competitive with state-of-the-art observation-to-forecast models.