Gaussian processes at the Helm(holtz): A more fluid model for ocean currents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Berlinghieri, Renato, Trippe, Brian L., Burt, David R., Giordano, Ryan, Srinivasan, Kaushik, Özgökmen, Tamay, Xia, Junfei, Broderick, Tamara
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Berlinghieri, Renato
Trippe, Brian L.
Burt, David R.
Giordano, Ryan
Srinivasan, Kaushik
Özgökmen, Tamay
Xia, Junfei
Broderick, Tamara
author_facet Berlinghieri, Renato
Trippe, Brian L.
Burt, David R.
Giordano, Ryan
Srinivasan, Kaushik
Özgökmen, Tamay
Xia, Junfei
Broderick, Tamara
contents Given sparse observations of buoy velocities, oceanographers are interested in reconstructing ocean currents away from the buoys and identifying divergences in a current vector field. As a first and modular step, we focus on the time-stationary case - for instance, by restricting to short time periods. Since we expect current velocity to be a continuous but highly non-linear function of spatial location, Gaussian processes (GPs) offer an attractive model. But we show that applying a GP with a standard stationary kernel directly to buoy data can struggle at both current reconstruction and divergence identification, due to some physically unrealistic prior assumptions. To better reflect known physical properties of currents, we propose to instead put a standard stationary kernel on the divergence and curl-free components of a vector field obtained through a Helmholtz decomposition. We show that, because this decomposition relates to the original vector field just via mixed partial derivatives, we can still perform inference given the original data with only a small constant multiple of additional computational expense. We illustrate the benefits of our method with theory and experiments on synthetic and real ocean data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_10364
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gaussian processes at the Helm(holtz): A more fluid model for ocean currents
Berlinghieri, Renato
Trippe, Brian L.
Burt, David R.
Giordano, Ryan
Srinivasan, Kaushik
Özgökmen, Tamay
Xia, Junfei
Broderick, Tamara
Methodology
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Applications
Given sparse observations of buoy velocities, oceanographers are interested in reconstructing ocean currents away from the buoys and identifying divergences in a current vector field. As a first and modular step, we focus on the time-stationary case - for instance, by restricting to short time periods. Since we expect current velocity to be a continuous but highly non-linear function of spatial location, Gaussian processes (GPs) offer an attractive model. But we show that applying a GP with a standard stationary kernel directly to buoy data can struggle at both current reconstruction and divergence identification, due to some physically unrealistic prior assumptions. To better reflect known physical properties of currents, we propose to instead put a standard stationary kernel on the divergence and curl-free components of a vector field obtained through a Helmholtz decomposition. We show that, because this decomposition relates to the original vector field just via mixed partial derivatives, we can still perform inference given the original data with only a small constant multiple of additional computational expense. We illustrate the benefits of our method with theory and experiments on synthetic and real ocean data.
title Gaussian processes at the Helm(holtz): A more fluid model for ocean currents
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10364