Forecasting Land Art Under Climate Scenarios

2026/07/30 by Alev Cinbarci, Sean Kalaycioglu
Computer Science · Mathematics · #cs.IT #math.IT

paper · pdf

15 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

arxiv created 2026/07/30 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31

Abstract

Robert Smithson's 1970 land artwork Spiral Jetty, located in the north arm of Utah's Great Salt Lake, provides a fixed remote-sensing target whose visual complexity reflects hydroclimatic conditions. A companion study analyzed 1,744 co-registered Landsat 4-9 and Sentinel-2 image chips spanning every year and month from 1984 to 2025. It found robust relationships between coarse-scale permutation entropy, mean intensity, and the third principal component of ResNet50 avg-pool embeddings, and lake elevation, regional temperature, and cumulative CO2. It also showed that image complexity leads lake stage by about three years and that the long-term trend is non-monotonic, with decline after 2015. Building on those findings, this paper develops a two-stage forecasting pipeline. Stage 1 applies IPCC AR6 SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, and SSP5-8.5 temperature changes to forecast regional temperature, north- and south-arm lake elevation, salinity, and cumulative CO2 for 2030 and 2050. Stage 2a projects 14 image-complexity features using linear and Random Forest regressions trained on the 42-year record. All six scenario-year combinations move the inputs outside the 1984-2025 training distribution. The Random Forest model therefore saturates near the post-2015 dry-playa regime, while a threshold-based hydrological interpretation classifies Spiral Jetty as fully exposed in every scenario. Stage 2b specifies a climate-conditioned latent-diffusion framework using Stable Diffusion XL fine-tuned with LoRA on the 1,744 chips, ControlNet conditioning on the climate vector, and a hydrological physics mask for ensemble image synthesis. Code is provided, and validation results will be released after diffusion training. We conclude by discussing ethical implications of generative speculation on cultural heritage and outlining a roadmap for forecasting at Sun Tunnels, Double Negative, Lightning Field, and Roden Crater.

Citations

• SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
• Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
• Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
• DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models
• High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
• High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
• Skilful precipitation nowcasting using deep generative models of radar
• Physics-informed GANs for Coastal Flood Visualization
• Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Related

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• Constructing a High Temporal Resolution Global Lakes Dataset via Swin-Unet with Applications to Area Prediction
• Synthesizing data products, mathematical models, and observational measurements for lake temperature forecasting
• Geospatial Diffusion for Land Cover Imperviousness Change Forecasting
• GLOFNet -- A Multimodal Dataset for GLOF Monitoring and Prediction