Spherical Physics-Informed Neural Operator with Multi-Scale Coupling for Meteorological Downscaling
Spherical Physics-Informed Neural Operator with Multi-Scale Coupling for Meteorological Downscaling
Yiqiang Ye, Yichi Wang, Jiawei Wen, Jiahui Jiang, Zhaoyu Zhong, Jiangjian Yu, Chunxia Xiao, Haodi Zhang
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies. Pages 6600-6608.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/734
Meteorological downscaling is crucial for high-resolution regional climate forecasting and disaster early warning. While neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling complex spatiotemporal mappings, existing frameworks often struggle with spherical manifold geometric distortions, inherent atmospheric multi-scale coupling mismatches, and lack of explicit atmospheric laws. We propose the Spherical Physics-informed Neural Operator, which utilizes a Spherical Laplacian Decomposition to partition atmospheric fields into hierarchical frequency components, maintaining exact point-wise correspondence across scales. To evaluate these representations at arbitrary locations, we introduce a localized spherical integral operator that approximates continuous kernel transforms via geometry-aware attention. Dynamical consistency is further enforced by embedding differentiable constraints into the learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework attains superior accuracy and zero-shot generalization across various meteorological variables and unseen queries, representing a robust and interpretable solution for global-to-regional meteorological downscaling.
Keywords:
Domain-specific AI4Tech: Other AI4Tech applications
