Stress-testing the coupled behavior of hybrid physics-machine learning climate simulations on an unseen, warmer climate

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lin, Jerry, Bhouri, Mohamed Aziz, Beucler, Tom, Yu, Sungduk, Pritchard, Michael
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Lin, Jerry
Bhouri, Mohamed Aziz
Beucler, Tom
Yu, Sungduk
Pritchard, Michael
author_facet Lin, Jerry
Bhouri, Mohamed Aziz
Beucler, Tom
Yu, Sungduk
Pritchard, Michael
contents Accurate and computationally-viable representations of clouds and turbulence are a long-standing challenge for climate model development. Traditional parameterizations that crudely but efficiently approximate these processes are a leading source of uncertainty in long-term projected warming and precipitation patterns. Machine Learning (ML)-based parameterizations have long been hailed as a promising alternative with the potential to yield higher accuracy at a fraction of the cost of more explicit simulations. However, these ML variants are often unpredictably unstable and inaccurate in \textit{coupled} testing (i.e. in a downstream hybrid simulation task where they are dynamically interacting with the large-scale climate model). These issues are exacerbated in out-of-distribution climates. Certain design decisions such as ``climate-invariant" feature transformation for moisture inputs, input vector expansion, and temporal history incorporation have been shown to improve coupled performance, but they may be insufficient for coupled out-of-distribution generalization. If feature selection and transformations can inoculate hybrid physics-ML climate models from non-physical, out-of-distribution extrapolation in a changing climate, there is far greater potential in extrapolating from observational data. Otherwise, training on multiple simulated climates becomes an inevitable necessity. While our results show generalization benefits from these design decisions, the obtained improvment does not sufficiently preclude the necessity of using multi-climate simulated training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_02098
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stress-testing the coupled behavior of hybrid physics-machine learning climate simulations on an unseen, warmer climate
Lin, Jerry
Bhouri, Mohamed Aziz
Beucler, Tom
Yu, Sungduk
Pritchard, Michael
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Accurate and computationally-viable representations of clouds and turbulence are a long-standing challenge for climate model development. Traditional parameterizations that crudely but efficiently approximate these processes are a leading source of uncertainty in long-term projected warming and precipitation patterns. Machine Learning (ML)-based parameterizations have long been hailed as a promising alternative with the potential to yield higher accuracy at a fraction of the cost of more explicit simulations. However, these ML variants are often unpredictably unstable and inaccurate in \textit{coupled} testing (i.e. in a downstream hybrid simulation task where they are dynamically interacting with the large-scale climate model). These issues are exacerbated in out-of-distribution climates. Certain design decisions such as ``climate-invariant" feature transformation for moisture inputs, input vector expansion, and temporal history incorporation have been shown to improve coupled performance, but they may be insufficient for coupled out-of-distribution generalization. If feature selection and transformations can inoculate hybrid physics-ML climate models from non-physical, out-of-distribution extrapolation in a changing climate, there is far greater potential in extrapolating from observational data. Otherwise, training on multiple simulated climates becomes an inevitable necessity. While our results show generalization benefits from these design decisions, the obtained improvment does not sufficiently preclude the necessity of using multi-climate simulated training data.
title Stress-testing the coupled behavior of hybrid physics-machine learning climate simulations on an unseen, warmer climate
topic Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02098