Climate Downscaling Using Neural Operator: Spatiotemporal Multimodal Fusion Operator with State-Query Coupled Kernel

Abstract

Climate downscaling is crucial for detailed small- scale analysis and for acquiring climate data in regions without weather stations. Operator learning has proven potential for this task. However, several challenges remain in operator learning, such as multimodal fusion, spatiotemporal fusion and input state and query adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose a Spatiotemporal Multimodal Fusion Operator with a State- Query Coupled Kernel (SMCK). This framework includes a latent space fusion encoder that encodes climate variables using position-wise multihead attention for multimodal fusion and integrates historical information to generate robust and precise representation. Additionally, we introduce a state-query coupled kernel that combines radial basis functions and discrete fourier encoding to enhance query location representation, while also adapting to the state to obtain the coupled kernel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and provides strong support for climate downscaling and the planning of climate-related strategies.