EGU25-11693, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11693
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Universal differential equations for estimating terrestrial evaporation
Olivier Bonte1, Diego G. Miralles1, Akash Koppa2, and Niko E. C. Verhoest1
Olivier Bonte et al.
  • 1Hydro-Climate Extremes Lab (H-CEL), Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium (olivier.bonte@ugent.be)
  • 2Laboratory of Catchment Hydrology and Geomorphology (CHANGE), EPFL Valais Wallis, Sion, Switzerland

Terrestrial evaporation (E) is an essential climate variable, linking water, energy and carbon cycles. As E is influenced by the state of the atmospheric boundary layer, vegetation and soil, its modelling is a complex task, resulting in a myriad of simulation approaches. To combine the strong predictive skills of data-driven models with the interpretability and physical consistency of process-based models (PBMs), a new research field of differentiable modelling has emerged1

Here, we present a differentiable framework for E estimation, facilitating online training of NNs as intermediate PBM components. It is inspired by the GLEAM framework for estimating E, which applies offline training (i.e., outside the PBM) of neural networks (NNs) predicting evaporative stress2,3. Building upon the Julia SciML ecosystem’s implementation of universal differential equations4, a wide array of numerical methods are available for solving the PBM’s ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and calculating the parameter sensitivities5. In this way, the effect of the numerical methods on the obtained hybrid model can be investigated, moving beyond the direct automatic differentiation through explicit Euler solutions of ODEs as often applied in other hydrological hybrid modelling approaches. 

 

References

1Shen, C., Appling, A.P., Gentine, P. et al., Differentiable modelling to unify machine learning and physical models for geosciences, Nat. Rev. Earth. Environ., 4, 552–567, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00450-9

2Koppa, A., Rains, D., Hulsman, P. et al., A deep learning-based hybrid model of global terrestrial evaporation, Nat. Commun., 13, 1912, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29543-7

3Miralles, D. G., Bonte, O., Koppa, A. et al., GLEAM4: global land evaporation dataset at 0.1° resolution from 1980 to near present, preprint, 2024, https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5488631/v1 

4Rackauckas, C., Ma, Y.,  Martensen, J. et al., Universal differential equations for scientific machine learning, ArXiv, 2020, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2001.04385 

5Sapienza, F., Bolibar, J., Schäfer, F. et al., Differentiable Programming for Differential Equations: A Review, ArXiv, 2024, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.09699 

How to cite: Bonte, O., Miralles, D. G., Koppa, A., and Verhoest, N. E. C.: Universal differential equations for estimating terrestrial evaporation, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-11693, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11693, 2025.

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