Spherical Physics-informed Neural Operator with Multi-scale Coupling for Meteorological Downscaling

Abstract

Meteorological downscaling is crucial for high-resolution regional climate forecasting and disaster early warning. While neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling complex spatiotemporal mappings, existing frameworks often struggle with spherical manifold geometric distortions, inherent atmospheric multi-scale coupling mismatches, and lack of explicit atmospheric laws. We propose the Spherical Physics-informed Neural Operator, which utilizes a Spherical Laplacian Decomposition to partition atmospheric fields into hierarchical frequency components, maintaining exact point-wise correspondence across scales. To evaluate these representations at arbitrary locations, we introduce a localized spherical integral operator that approximates continuous kernel transforms via geometry-aware attention. Dynamical consistency is further enforced by embedding differentiable constraints into the learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework attains superior accuracy and zero-shot generalization across various meteorological variables and unseen queries, representing a robust and interpretable solution for global-to-regional meteorological downscaling.

arXiv commentPublished in IJCAI 2026 (AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies). 9 pages, 4 figures