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research article

Downscaling of Historical Wind Fields over Switzerland Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Miralles, Ophelia Mireille Anna  
•
Steinfeld, Daniel
•
Martius, Olivia
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November 28, 2022
Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems

Near-surface wind is difficult to estimate using global numerical weather and climate models, because airflow is strongly modified by underlying topography, especially that of a country such as Switzerland. In this article, we use a statistical approach based on deep learning and a high-resolution digital elevation model to spatially downscale hourly near-surface wind fields at coarse resolution from ERA5 reanalysis from their original 25-km grid to a 1.1-km grid. A 1.1-km-resolution wind dataset for 2016–20 from the operational numerical weather prediction model COSMO-1 of the national weather service MeteoSwiss is used to train and validate our model, a generative adversarial network (GAN) with gradient penalized Wasserstein loss aided by transfer learning. The results are realistic-looking high-resolution historical maps of gridded hourly wind fields over Switzerland and very good and robust predictions of the aggregated wind speed distribution. Regionally averaged image-specific metrics show a clear improvement in prediction relative to ERA5, with skill measures generally better for locations over the flatter Swiss Plateau than for Alpine regions. The downscaled wind fields demonstrate higher-resolution, physically plausible orographic effects, such as ridge acceleration and sheltering, that are not resolved in the original ERA5 fields.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1175/AIES-D-22-0018.1
Author(s)
Miralles, Ophelia Mireille Anna  
Steinfeld, Daniel
Martius, Olivia
Davison, Anthony  
Date Issued

2022-11-28

Published in
Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems
Volume

1

Issue

4

Article Number

e220018

Subjects

Topographic effects

•

Wind

•

Downscaling

•

Numerical weather prediction/forecasting

•

Deep learning

•

Neural networks

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
STAT  
FunderGrant Number

FNS

200021_178824

Available on Infoscience
August 13, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/199700
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