Deep Learning for Verification of Earth's surfaces

Ever increasing computing capabilities and crave for high-resolution numerical weather prediction and climate information are specially interesting for the representation of Earth surfaces. Knowledge of accurate and up-to-date surface state for ecosystems such as forest, agriculture, lakes and cities strongly influence the skin temperatures, turbulent latent and sensible heat fluxes providing the lower boundary conditions for energy and moisture availability near the surface. A quick and automatic tool to assess the benefits of updating different surface fields, that makes use of a neural network regression model trained to simulate satellite observed surface skin temperatures, was developed. This tool was deployed to determine the accuracy of several global datasets for lakes, forest, and urban distributions. Comparison results will be shown. The neural network regression model has proven to be useful and easily adaptable to assess unforeseen impacts of ancillary datasets, also detecting erroneous regional areas over the globe, proving to be a valuable support to model development.