Generative Atmospheric Super-Resolution from Heterogeneous In Situ Observations through Composable Interfaces
On the map: Diffusion models → Inverse problems and image restoration
Abstract (arXiv)
Atmospheric observations are sparse, heterogeneous, and unevenly distributed, whereas many generative atmospheric models learn distributions over regularly gridded multivariate states. Once pretrained, diffusion models can supply atmospheric priors that can be combined with observation-derived likelihood factors in a Bayesian formulation. However, these observation sources differ substantially in geometry and sampling density, complicating the consistent use of their observations within a common inference framework. Here, we formulate this reconstruction problem as generative atmospheric super-resolution and introduce composable observation interfaces for conditioning a single pretrained 13-variable atmospheric diffusion model. The interfaces convert sparse radiosonde (R), clustered aircraft (A), and dense irregular surface-station (S) observations into source-specific likelihood factors that specify where observations constrain the gridded state, how residuals are counted under uneven sampling, and how strongly each source guides posterior sampling. We developed the aircraft and surface observation interfaces using 2019 observations and evaluated the selected interfaces throughout 2020 without further tuning. Compared with reconstructions conditioned only on radiosonde observations, the composed R+A+S interface reduces RMSE evaluated against ERA5 by 9.24% across all 13 state variables over the CONUS domain. The aircraft and surface factors provide complementary improvements in upper-air and surface variables. The R+A+S combination also lowers the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), while evaluations at held-out aircraft and surface-station observations show reduced prediction errors. Together, these results demonstrate a modular route for conditioning a pretrained atmospheric generative prior on heterogeneous in situ observations without retraining the underlying model.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 19 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.
Builds on
19 of 55 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Rethinking Diffusion Posterior Sampling: From Conditional Score Estimator to Maximizing a Posterior31 Jan
- 2024Principled Probabilistic Imaging using Diffusion Models as Plug-and-Play Priors29 May
- 2022Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems29 Sep
- 2022Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models27 Jan
Other references · 15
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 3,045
- 2021Solving Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging with Score-Based Generative Modelscited by 521
- 2023Practical and Asymptotically Exact Conditional Sampling in Diffusion Modelscited by 232
- 2022Diffusion models as plug-and-play priorscited by 231
- 2023Score-based Data Assimilationcited by 96
- 2024DiffDA: a Diffusion Model for Weather-scale Data Assimilationcited by 61
- 2024Deep Generative Data Assimilation in Multimodal Settingcited by 29
- 2024Generative Data Assimilation of Sparse Weather Station Observations at Kilometer Scalescited by 27
- 2025Appa: Bending Weather Dynamics with Latent Diffusion Models for Global Data Assimilationcited by 20
- 2022WeatherBench Probability: A benchmark dataset for probabilistic medium-range weather forecasting along with deep learning baseline modelscited by 17
- 2024ADAF: An Artificial Intelligence Data Assimilation Framework for Weather Forecastingcited by 10
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