SwinIR: A Deterministic Baseline for Sea Ice Downscaling
Background Accurate forecasting of Arctic sea ice is a critical challenge in climate science, with implications for shipping routes, ecosystem monitoring, and climate modelling. Recent work has shown that deep learning models can produce skillful sea ice forecasts and downscaled sea ice concentration (SIC) maps, often outperforming classical numerical methods at certain lead times and spatial scales. A central open question in this space is what constitutes the strongest deterministic baseline before introducing probabilistic or generative approaches. ...