Estimating carbon pools in the shelf sea environment: reanalysis or model-informed machine learning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Skakala, Jozef
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Skakala, Jozef
author_facet Skakala, Jozef
contents Shelf seas are important for carbon sequestration and carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. Alternative can be provided by reanalyses, but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use an ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model the relationship between the directly observable variables and carbon pools. We demonstrate for North-West European Shelf (NWES) sea environment, that when the deep ensemble trained on a model free run simulation is applied to the NWES reanalysis, it is capable to reproduce the reanalysis outputs for carbon pools and additionally provide uncertainty information. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10178
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating carbon pools in the shelf sea environment: reanalysis or model-informed machine learning?
Skakala, Jozef
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Shelf seas are important for carbon sequestration and carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. Alternative can be provided by reanalyses, but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use an ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model the relationship between the directly observable variables and carbon pools. We demonstrate for North-West European Shelf (NWES) sea environment, that when the deep ensemble trained on a model free run simulation is applied to the NWES reanalysis, it is capable to reproduce the reanalysis outputs for carbon pools and additionally provide uncertainty information. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.
title Estimating carbon pools in the shelf sea environment: reanalysis or model-informed machine learning?
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10178