Spatial Downscaling of Sea Surface Temperature Using Diffusion Model

In recent years, advancements in high-resolution digital twin platforms or artificial intelligence marine forecasting have led to the increased requirements of high-resolution oceanic data. However, existing sea surface temperature (SST) products from observations often fail to meet researchers’ resolution requirements. Deep learning models serve as practical techniques for improving the spatial resolution of SST data. In particular, diffusion models (DMs) have attracted widespread attention due to their ability to generate more vivid and realistic results than other neural networks. Despite DMs’ potential, their application in SST spatial downscaling remains largely unexplored. Hence we propose a novel DM-based spatial downscaling model, called DIFFDS, designed to obtain a high-resolution version of the input SST and to restore most of the meso scale processes. Experimental results indicate that DIFFDS is more effective and accurate than baseline neural networks, its downscaled high-resolution SST data are also visually comparable to the ground truth. The DIFFDS achieves an average root-mean-square error of 0.1074 °C and a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 50.48 dB in the 4× scale downscaling task, which shows its accuracy.