Guiding future global temperature distributions with simulations and observations

Francesco Immorlano, Elijah Tavares, Felix Draxler, Juan Nathaniel, Violette Launeau +4

Assessing climate risks requires projections of daily temperature distributions, including rare and spatially widespread extremes. Climate simulations are costly and biased, while correcting them toward observations risks suppressing inter-model differences. We train a single machine-learning emulator, a conditional diffusion model, on seventeen CMIP6 models and ERA5 reanalysis to generate spatially coherent daily temperature fields conditioned on model identity, date, and CO2-equivalent concentration. At sampling time, diffusion guidance reduces model biases by steering each emulated climate-model distribution toward observations, with its strength selected through perfect-model experiments using withheld simulated futures. Observational influence decreases with projection horizon and forcing. Across seventeen synthetic targets, guidance more than halves median biases in the 1st and 99th percentiles of daily temperature, improves probabilistic scores and reliability, and reduces median annual global-mean temperature RMSE by 32-57% across three emission scenarios. In a detailed benchmark, guidance also outperforms established bias corrections on daily-field probabilistic scores.…