RainScaleGAN: A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Rainfall Downscaling

To this day, accurately simulating local-scale precipitation and reliably reproducing its distribution remains a challenging task. The limited horizontal resolution of global climate models is among the primary factors undermining their skill in this context. The physical mechanisms driving the onset and development of precipitation, especially in extreme events, operate at spatiotemporal scales smaller than those numerically resolved, thus struggling to be captured accurately. To circumvent this limitation, several downscaling approaches have been developed over the last decades to address the discrepancy between the spatial resolution of models’ output and the resolution required by local-scale applications. In this paper, we introduce RainScaleGAN, a conditional deep convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for precipitation downscaling. GANs have been effectively used in image superresolution, an approach highly relevant for downscaling tasks. RainScaleGAN’s capabilities are tested in a perfect-model setup, where the spatial resolution of a precipitation dataset is artificially degraded from 0.25° × 0.25° to 2° × 2°, and RainScaleGAN is used to restore it. The developed model outperforms one of the leading precipitation downscaling methods found in the literature. RainScaleGAN not only generates a synthetic dataset featuring plausible high-resolution spatial patterns and intensities but also produces a precipitation distribution with statistics closely mirroring those of the ground-truth dataset. Given that RainScaleGAN’s approach is agnostic with respect to the underlying physics, the method has the potential to be applied to other physical variables such as surface winds or temperature.