Towards debiasing climate simulations using unsupervised image-to-image translation networks

Climate models form the basis of a vast portion of earth system research, and inform our climate policy. Due to the complex nature of our climate system, and the approximations which must necessarily be made in simulating it, these climate models may not perfectly match observations. For further research, these outputs must be bias corrected against observations, but current methods of debiasing do not take into account spatial correlations. We evaluate unsupervised image-to-image translation networks, specifically the UNIT model architecture, for their ability to produce more spatially realistic debiasing than the standard techniques used in the climate community.