Surface Conditioning for Zero-Shot Multivariate Correction in a Marine Biogeochemistry Emulator

Abstract

Bias correction in process-based models usually means iterative data assimilation with explicit covariance modelling. We propose a lightweight alternative based on a neural emulator of marine biogeochemistry (BGC), showing that the conditioning pathway of its autoencoder can serve as an observation injection point. The decoder is conditioned on surface variables via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), originally designed to incorporate physical boundary forcings. We extend these inputs to include surface chlorophyll-a and replace the simulated field with satellite observations at inference time. The surface substitution propagates through the water column, improving agreement with depth-resolved observations at all depths, and spreads to other output variables in a pattern consistent with expected trophic relationships.