Flexible generation of daily Earth system model projections across radiative forcing scenarios

Earth system model (ESM) projections of the climate system's response to anthropogenic forcing are central to assess the impacts of climate change and inform adaptation and mitigation policies.

However, given their high computational cost, projections are only made for a limited set of standardized forcing scenarios with limited temporal extent, such as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), the spatiotemporal resolution remains too low for direct impact assessments, and uncertainties cannot be comprehensively quantified.

Recent data-driven models offer efficient and accurate high-resolution simulations for weather prediction, but cannot extrapolate to future greenhouse gas concentrations because they cannot capture the responses to unprecedented forcing, limiting their value for climate change projections.

Here, we combine response theory with a tailored generative machine learning framework to address this challenge.

Our approach extracts the physical forced response to radiative forcing from monthly low-resolution ESM fields, and uses this response to guide a generative model to infer consistent daily global high-resolution temperature and precipitation projections.

Our probabilistic approach generalizes across ESMs and provides long-term, bias-corrected responses to radiative forcing at high spatiotemporal resolution.

It efficiently generates large ensembles needed for uncertainty quantification, effectively fills the gaps between existing SSPs, and readily extends climate projections to 2300 and beyond.

Our framework hence complements ESM projections by providing efficient, stable, and high spatiotemporal resolution long-term climate projection ensembles across emission scenarios, enabling detailed impact assessment and exploration of long-term climate commitment.