Developing a data-driven ocean model
- 1University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
- 2British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK
- 3UCL, London, UK
- 4Alan Turing Institute, London, UK
The recent boom in machine learning and data science has led to a number of new opportunities in the environmental sciences. In particular, climate models represent the best tools we have to predict, understand and potentially mitigate climate change, however these process-based models are incredibly complex and require huge amounts of high-performance computing resources. Machine learning offers opportunities to greatly improve the computational efficiency of these models.
Here we discuss our recent efforts to reduce the computational cost associated with running a process-based model of the physical ocean by developing an analogous data-driven model. We train statistical and machine learning algorithms using the outputs from a highly idealised sector configuration of general circulation model (MITgcm). Our aim is to develop an algorithm which is able to predict the future state of the general circulation model to a similar level of accuracy in a more computationally efficient manner.
We first develop a linear regression model to investigate the sensitivity of data-driven approaches to various inputs, e.g. temperature on different spatial and temporal scales, and meta-variables such as location information. Following this, we develop a neural network model to replicate the general circulation model, as in the work of Dueben and Bauer 2018, and Scher 2018.
We present a discussion on the sensitivity of data-driven models and preliminary results from the neural network based model.
Dueben, P. D., & Bauer, P. (2018). Challenges and design choices for global weather and climate models based on machine learning. Geoscientific Model Development, 11(10), 3999-4009.
Scher, S. (2018). Toward Data‐Driven Weather and Climate Forecasting: Approximating a Simple General Circulation Model With Deep Learning. Geophysical Research Letters, 45(22), 12-616.
How to cite: Furner, R., Haynes, P., Jones, D., Munday, D., Paige, B., and Shuckburgh, E.: Developing a data-driven ocean model, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19339, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19339, 2020.