GeoFAR: Geography-Informed Frequency-Aware Super-Resolution for Climate Data

Abstract

Super-resolving climate data is crucial for fine-grained decision-making in various domains, ranging from agriculture to environmental conservation. However, existing super-resolution approaches struggle to generate the high-frequency spatial information present in climate data, especially over regions showing complex terrain variability. A key obstacle lies in a frequency bias existing in both deep neural networks (DNNs) and climate data: DNNs exhibit such bias by overfitting to low-frequency information, which is further exacerbated by the prevalence of low-frequency components in climate data (e.g., plains, oceans). As a consequence, geography-dependent high-frequency details are hard to reconstruct from coarse climate inputs with DNNs. To improve the fidelity of climate super-resolution (SR), we introduce GeoFAR: by explicitly encoding climatic patterns at different frequencies, while learning implicit geographical neural representations (i.e., related to location and elevation), our approach provides frequency-aware and geography-informed representations for climate SR, thereby reconstructing fine-grained climate information at high resolution. Experiments show that GeoFAR is a model-agnostic approach that can mitigate high-frequency prediction errors in both deterministic and generative SR models, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across various spatial resolutions, atmospheric variables, and downscaling ratios. Datasets and code are available at https://eceo-epfl.github.io/GeoFAR/.