CloudFlow: A Flow Matching Model to Generate High-Resolution Cloud Structures

Our limited understanding of clouds is the dominant source of uncertainty in future climate predictions. Understanding how changing atmospheric environmental conditions constrain cloud organisational patterns and their radiative effects is key to understanding their impact on future climate change. We present CloudFlow, a flow matching model that is able to generate high-resolution cloud structures conditioned on coarse-scale atmospheric conditions. Our model generates realistic cloud structures that match the spectra and distributions of the original high-resolution scenes. CloudFlow introduces a new modeling regime to study how atmospheric environmental conditions impact cloud morphologies which will contribute to an improved understanding of cloud feedbacks, the cloud response to a changing climate and its effect on climate itself.