Diffusion-Based Super-Resolution of Adriatic Sea Oceanographic Fields
Abstract
High-resolution oceanographic fields are critical for resolving mesoscale and sub-mesoscale coastal dynamics, yet their generation remains constrained by both computational cost and observational sparsity. We present OcDiffSR, a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for oceanographic super-resolution that reconstructs high-resolution sea-surface fields from coarse-resolution reanalysis inputs. The model is trained on ten years (2011-2020) of paired low-resolution (GLORYS12V1, 1/12) and high-resolution (Mediterranean Sea Physics Reanalysis, Med MFC, 1/24) data, and evaluated on an independent test year (2009) over the Adriatic Sea. OcDiffSR employs a conditional U-Net augmented with multi-scale low-resolution encoders, cross-attention bottleneck layers, and sinusoidal seasonal embeddings via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), enabling joint super-resolution of sea-surface temperature (SST), salinity (SSS), and horizontal velocity components with visually coherent circulation patterns. Benchmarked against bilinear interpolation and the state-of-the-art residual diffusion model CorrDiff, OcDiffSR achieves substantially lower reconstruction errors for scalar fields (RMSESST=0.477 C, RMSESSS=0.346 psu), near-unity Pearson correlation (PCC >= 0.999), and high structural similarity (SSIM >= 0.964). For dynamical vector fields, OcDiffSR outperforms both baselines in absolute error and spatial coherence, though moderate correlation (PCC = 0.64) reflects the intrinsic stochasticity of oceanic velocity fields. Daily and monthly evaluations confirm temporal robustness across all seasons. These results establish OcDiffSR as a reliable framework for high-fidelity oceanographic downscaling and reanalysis enhancement, producing fields that are visually consistent with known ocean dynamics.
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BibTeX
@misc{srivastava2026diffusionbased,
title = {{Diffusion-Based Super-Resolution of Adriatic Sea Oceanographic Fields}},
author = {Rajat Srivastava and Muhammad Sarmad and Emanuele Mele and Massimo Cafaro and Marco Pulimeno and Italo Epicoco},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.22574},
eprint = {2609.22574},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22574},
note = {CC BY-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Diffusion-Based Super-Resolution of Adriatic Sea Oceanographic Fields
AU - Rajat Srivastava
AU - Muhammad Sarmad
AU - Emanuele Mele
AU - Massimo Cafaro
AU - Marco Pulimeno
AU - Italo Epicoco
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/18
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.22574
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22574
AB - High-resolution oceanographic fields are critical for resolving mesoscale and sub-mesoscale coastal dynamics, yet their generation remains constrained by both computational cost and observational sparsity. We present OcDiffSR, a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for oceanographic super-resolution that reconstructs high-resolution sea-surface fields from coarse-resolution reanalysis inputs. The model is trained on ten years (2011-2020) of paired low-resolution (GLORYS12V1, 1/12) and high-resolution (Mediterranean Sea Physics Reanalysis, Med MFC, 1/24) data, and evaluated on an independent test year (2009) over the Adriatic Sea. OcDiffSR employs a conditional U-Net augmented with multi-scale low-resolution encoders, cross-attention bottleneck layers, and sinusoidal seasonal embeddings via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), enabling joint super-resolution of sea-surface temperature (SST), salinity (SSS), and horizontal velocity components with visually coherent circulation patterns. Benchmarked against bilinear interpolation and the state-of-the-art residual diffusion model CorrDiff, OcDiffSR achieves substantially lower reconstruction errors for scalar fields (RMSESST=0.477 C, RMSESSS=0.346 psu), near-unity Pearson correlation (PCC >= 0.999), and high structural similarity (SSIM >= 0.964). For dynamical vector fields, OcDiffSR outperforms both baselines in absolute error and spatial coherence, though moderate correlation (PCC = 0.64) reflects the intrinsic stochasticity of oceanic velocity fields. Daily and monthly evaluations confirm temporal robustness across all seasons. These results establish OcDiffSR as a reliable framework for high-fidelity oceanographic downscaling and reanalysis enhancement, producing fields that are visually consistent with known ocean dynamics.
ER -