Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks for Improving Earth System Model Precipitation
- 1School of Engineering & Design, Earth System Modelling, Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany
- 2Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany
- 3Cluster of Excellence - Machine Learning for Science, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
- 4Global Systems Institute and Department of Mathematics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
The simulation of precipitation in numerical Earth system models (ESMs) involves various processes on a wide range of scales, requiring high temporal and spatial resolution for realistic simulations. This can lead to biases in computationally efficient ESMs that have a coarse resolution and limited model complexity. Traditionally, these biases are corrected by relating the distributions of historical simulations with observations [1]. While these methods successfully improve the modelled statistics, unrealistic spatial features that require a larger spatial context are not addressed.
Here we apply generative adversarial networks (GANs) [2] to transform precipitation of the CM2Mc-LPJmL ESM [3] into a bias-corrected and more realistic output. Feature attribution shows that the GAN has correctly learned to identify spatial regions with the largest bias during training. Our method presents a general bias correction framework that can be extended to a wider range of ESM variables to create highly realistic but computationally inexpensive simulations of future climates. We also discuss the generalizability of our approach to projections from CMIP6, given that the GAN is only trained on historical data.
[1] A.J. Cannon et al. "Bias correction of GCM precipitation by quantile mapping: How well do methods preserve changes in quantiles and extremes?." Journal of Climate 28.17 (2015): 6938-6959.
[2] I. Goodfellow et al. "Generative adversarial nets." Advances in neural information processing systems 27 (2014).
[3] M. Drüke et al. "CM2Mc-LPJmL v1.0: Biophysical coupling of a process-based dynamic vegetation model with managed land to a general circulation model." Geoscientific Model Development 14.6 (2021): 4117--4141.
How to cite: Hess, P., Drüke, M., Petri, S., Strnad, F., and Boers, N.: Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks for Improving Earth System Model Precipitation, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-4923, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-4923, 2022.