Towards Physically Consistent Deep Learning For Climate Model Parameterizations

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kühbacher, Birgit, Iglesias-Suarez, Fernando, Kilbertus, Niki, Eyring, Veronika
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Kühbacher, Birgit
Iglesias-Suarez, Fernando
Kilbertus, Niki
Eyring, Veronika
author_facet Kühbacher, Birgit
Iglesias-Suarez, Fernando
Kilbertus, Niki
Eyring, Veronika
contents Climate models play a critical role in understanding and projecting climate change. Due to their complexity, their horizontal resolution of about 40-100 km remains too coarse to resolve processes such as clouds and convection, which need to be approximated via parameterizations. These parameterizations are a major source of systematic errors and large uncertainties in climate projections. Deep learning (DL)-based parameterizations, trained on data from computationally expensive short, high-resolution simulations, have shown great promise for improving climate models in that regard. However, their lack of interpretability and tendency to learn spurious non-physical correlations result in reduced trust in the climate simulation. We propose an efficient supervised learning framework for DL-based parameterizations that leads to physically consistent models with improved interpretability and negligible computational overhead compared to standard supervised training. First, key features determining the target physical processes are uncovered. Subsequently, the neural network is fine-tuned using only those relevant features. We show empirically that our method robustly identifies a small subset of the inputs as actual physical drivers, therefore removing spurious non-physical relationships. This results in by design physically consistent and interpretable neural networks while maintaining the predictive performance of unconstrained black-box DL-based parameterizations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_03920
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Physically Consistent Deep Learning For Climate Model Parameterizations
Kühbacher, Birgit
Iglesias-Suarez, Fernando
Kilbertus, Niki
Eyring, Veronika
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Climate models play a critical role in understanding and projecting climate change. Due to their complexity, their horizontal resolution of about 40-100 km remains too coarse to resolve processes such as clouds and convection, which need to be approximated via parameterizations. These parameterizations are a major source of systematic errors and large uncertainties in climate projections. Deep learning (DL)-based parameterizations, trained on data from computationally expensive short, high-resolution simulations, have shown great promise for improving climate models in that regard. However, their lack of interpretability and tendency to learn spurious non-physical correlations result in reduced trust in the climate simulation. We propose an efficient supervised learning framework for DL-based parameterizations that leads to physically consistent models with improved interpretability and negligible computational overhead compared to standard supervised training. First, key features determining the target physical processes are uncovered. Subsequently, the neural network is fine-tuned using only those relevant features. We show empirically that our method robustly identifies a small subset of the inputs as actual physical drivers, therefore removing spurious non-physical relationships. This results in by design physically consistent and interpretable neural networks while maintaining the predictive performance of unconstrained black-box DL-based parameterizations.
title Towards Physically Consistent Deep Learning For Climate Model Parameterizations
topic Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03920