Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections

Climate change has shifted from a purely scientific topic to a deeply politicized issue. To combat climate change we need to create mutual understanding on the links between policies, global warming, and city-scale impacts. Climate models have been incredibly helpful in generating this causal unders...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lütjens, Björn
Other Authors: Newman, Dava J.
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151644
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1616-4830
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author Lütjens, Björn
author2 Newman, Dava J.
author_facet Newman, Dava J.
Lütjens, Björn
author_sort Lütjens, Björn
collection MIT
description Climate change has shifted from a purely scientific topic to a deeply politicized issue. To combat climate change we need to create mutual understanding on the links between policies, global warming, and city-scale impacts. Climate models have been incredibly helpful in generating this causal understanding, but running them requires supercomputers and is only accessible to the minority of researchers. This thesis explores how emulating climate models with deep learning can make them more accessible and, at the same time, raise novel challenges in deep learning on physical, long-term time-series, and high-dimensional data. This dissertation shows that deep learning can decrease runtime in dynamical models, increase accuracy in local climate projections, and generate visualizations of climate impacts. Specifically, this thesis contributes a hybrid model, called multiscale neural operator, that corrects fast low-resolution simulations by learning a hard-to-model parametrization term. This achieves to cut runtime complexity from quadratic to quasilinear which can result in a 1000x faster model on selected equations in multiscale dynamics. This thesis also contributes satellite imagery of the future that visualizes climate data using physically-consistent deep generative vision models. The thesis contributions are framed in an envisioned online tool that rapidly emulates the city-scale impacts of various climate policies. In the future, such an emulator could accelerate local climate risk analyses, attribution of extreme events, and the understanding of causal links between between impacts and policies.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1516442023-08-01T03:01:24Z Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections Lütjens, Björn Newman, Dava J. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Climate change has shifted from a purely scientific topic to a deeply politicized issue. To combat climate change we need to create mutual understanding on the links between policies, global warming, and city-scale impacts. Climate models have been incredibly helpful in generating this causal understanding, but running them requires supercomputers and is only accessible to the minority of researchers. This thesis explores how emulating climate models with deep learning can make them more accessible and, at the same time, raise novel challenges in deep learning on physical, long-term time-series, and high-dimensional data. This dissertation shows that deep learning can decrease runtime in dynamical models, increase accuracy in local climate projections, and generate visualizations of climate impacts. Specifically, this thesis contributes a hybrid model, called multiscale neural operator, that corrects fast low-resolution simulations by learning a hard-to-model parametrization term. This achieves to cut runtime complexity from quadratic to quasilinear which can result in a 1000x faster model on selected equations in multiscale dynamics. This thesis also contributes satellite imagery of the future that visualizes climate data using physically-consistent deep generative vision models. The thesis contributions are framed in an envisioned online tool that rapidly emulates the city-scale impacts of various climate policies. In the future, such an emulator could accelerate local climate risk analyses, attribution of extreme events, and the understanding of causal links between between impacts and policies. Ph.D. 2023-07-31T19:55:20Z 2023-07-31T19:55:20Z 2023-06 2023-06-16T11:29:19.933Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151644 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1616-4830 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Copyright retained by author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Lütjens, Björn
Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title_full Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title_fullStr Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title_full_unstemmed Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title_short Deep Learning Emulators for Accessible Climate Projections
title_sort deep learning emulators for accessible climate projections
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151644
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1616-4830
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