Steering Diffusion Priors with Sparse Observations for High-Resolution Temperature Downscaling
Local heatwave hazard depends on fine-scale air temperature, but ground stations are sparse and reanalysis products such as ERA5 cannot resolve the terrain and land-surface contrasts that shape real heat exposure. We present a conditional diffusion emulator for high-resolution 2-m temperature downscaling, conditioned on static geography, a training climatology, exact-time ERA5 temperature, and solar and temporal features, guided at inference by score-based data assimilation (SDA): a differentiable Gaussian observation likelihood steers the diffusion score toward sparse revealed temperature observations without any retraining. On a controlled 32-case synthetic-grid protocol over AORC, guidance improves hidden-cell reconstruction over both ERA5 and a strong observation-proximal nearest-neighbor baseline once observation density reaches 1\% (RMSE 0.318 vs.\ 0.431~K, winning all 32 cases), while sparser regimes still favor direct interpolation. We further map the full guidance-strength landscape across three observation densities, showing that the optimal strength shifts systematically with density and that over-guiding causes sharp, predictable degradation -- giving a concrete operating recipe rather than a single untuned setting. The resulting fields are intended as a temperature layer for downstream heatwave-hazard products such as threshold exceedance and cumulative heat-burden. The present evidence is a controlled synthetic-grid validation; station-network and held-out-year evaluations are the next steps toward deployment.