IceDiff: High Resolution and High-Quality Arctic Sea Ice Forecasting with Generative Diffusion Prior

Jingyi Xu, Siwei Tu, Weidong Yang, Ben Fei, Shuhao Li, Keyi Liu, Yeqi Luo, Lipeng Ma, Lei Bai; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 10567-10576

Variation of Arctic sea ice has significant impacts on polar ecosystems, transporting routes, coastal communities, and global climate. Tracing the change of sea ice at a finer scale is paramount for both operational applications and scientific studies. Recent pan-Arctic sea ice forecasting methods that leverage advances in artificial intelligence have made promising progress over numerical models. However, forecasting sea ice at higher resolutions is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we propose a two-module cooperative deep learning framework, IceDiff, to forecast sea ice concentration at finer scales. IceDiff first leverages a vision transformer to generate coarse yet superior forecasting results over previous methods at a regular 25km grid. This high-quality sea ice forecasting can be utilized as reliable guidance for the next module. Subsequently, an unconditional diffusion model pre-trained on low-resolution sea ice concentration maps is utilized for sampling down-scaled sea ice forecasting via a zero-shot guided sampling strategy and a patch-based method. For the first time, IceDiff demonstrates sea ice forecasting with a 6.25km resolution. IceDiff extends the boundary of existing sea ice forecasting models and more importantly, its capability to generate high-resolution sea ice concentration data is vital for pragmatic usages and research.