ResLap: Generating High-Resolution Climate Prediction Through Image Super-Resolution

In recent years, many models based on the convolutional neural network have achieved high-quality reconstruction for single image super-resolution. Meanwhile, many researches on image super-resolution have been applied to various fields. However, only a few research works have been applied to climate prediction. In this paper, we present ResLap to achieve high-resolution climate prediction. ResLap is a spatial downscaling method that converts low spatial resolution climate data into high-resolution regional climate forecasts. This method mainly introduces a novel residual dense block (RDB) into the Laplacian pyramid super-resolution network (LapSRN). Among them, we use LapSRN to achieve upsampling image reconstruction, and adopt RDB to fully extract the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Extensive experimental results on benchmark climate datasets show that our new proposed model performs better than many super-resolution methods. Besides, the climate data are more complicated than the general image, because of its dynamic and chaotic nature. To facilitate model training, we integrate original climate data provided by the China Meteorological Administration, then convert it into trainable climate images. We also publish some climate image datasets online for research. Finally, we avoid the checkerboard artifacts in the generated high-resolution climate images.