Technical Report: Towards Unified Diffusion Models for Multi-Model Climate Emulation at Scale

Abstract: Large ensembles of climate projections are essential for characterizing uncertainty in future climate and extreme weather events, yet computational constraints of numerical climate models limit ensemble sizes to a small number of realizations per model. We present a unified conditional diffusion model that dramatically reduces this computational barrier by learning shared distributional patterns across multiple Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 models and emission scenarios. Rather than training separate emulators for each model-scenario combination, our approach captures the common statistical structures underlying nine CMIP6 models, generating daily temperature maps with a global coverage for historical and future periods. This unified framework enables: (i) efficient probabilistic sampling for comprehensive uncertainty quantification across models and scenarios; (ii) rapid generation of large ensembles that would be computationally intractable with traditional climate models; (iii) variance-reduced treatment effect analysis via fixed-seed generation that disentangles forced climate responses from internal variability. Evaluations on held-out models demonstrate reliable generalization to unseen future climates, enabling rapid exploration of different emission pathways.