Towards Climate Variable Prediction with Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Normalizing Flows

Abstract: This study investigates how conditional normalizing flows can be applied to remote sensing data products in climate science for spatio-temporal prediction. The method is chosen due to its desired properties such as exact likelihood computation, predictive uncertainty estimation and efficient inference and sampling which facilitates faster exploration of climate scenarios. Experimental findings reveal that the conditioned spatio-temporal flow surpasses both deterministic and stochastic baselines in prolonged rollout scenarios. It exhibits stable extrapolation beyond the training time horizon for extended rollout durations. These findings contribute valuable insights to the field of spatio-temporal modeling, with potential applications spanning diverse scientific disciplines.