Controlling Weather Field Synthesis Using Variational Autoencoders

One of the consequences of climate change is an observed increase in the frequency of extreme climate events. That poses a challenge for weather forecast and generation algorithms, which learn from historical data but should embed an often uncertain bias to create correct scenarios. This paper investigates how mapping climate data to a known distribution using variational autoencoders might help explore such biases and control the synthesis of weather fields towards scenarios with more frequent extreme weather events. We experimented using a monsoon-affected precipitation dataset from southwest India, which should give a roughly stable pattern of rainy days and ease investigating the suitability of our solution. We report compelling results showing that mapping complex weather data to a known distribution implements an efficient control for weather field synthesis towards more (or less) extreme scenarios.