Mustafa, Mustafa | Engineering Papers

DOE OSTI2022

Fast, High-fidelity Lyα Forests with Convolutional Neural Networks

Full-physics cosmological simulations are powerful tools for studying the formation and evolution of structure in the universe but require extreme computational resources. Here, we train a convolutional neural network to use a cheaper N-body-only simulation to reconstruct the baryon hydrodynamic variables (density, temperature, and velocity) on scales relevant to the Lyα forest, using data from Nyx simulations. We show that our method enables rapid estimation of these fields at a resolution of ~20 kpc, and captures the statistics of the Lyα forest with much greater accuracy than existing approximations. Because our model is fully convolutional, we can train on smaller simulation boxes and deploy on much larger ones, enabling substantial computational savings. Furthermore, as our method produces an approximation for the hydrodynamic fields instead of Lyα flux directly, it is not limited to a particular choice of ionizing background or mean transmitted flux.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2022

Towards physics-inspired data-driven weather forecasting: integrating data assimilation with a deep spatial-transformer-based U-NET in a case study with ERA5

Abstract. There is growing interest in data-driven weather prediction (DDWP), e.g., using convolutional neural networks such as U-NET that are trained on data from models or reanalysis. Here, we propose three components, inspired by physics, to integrate with commonly used DDWP models in order to improve their forecast accuracy. These components are (1) a deep spatial transformer added to the latent space of U-NET to capture rotation and scaling transformation in the latent space for spatiotemporal data, (2) a data-assimilation (DA) algorithm to ingest noisy observations and improve the initial conditions for next forecasts, and (3) a multi-time-step algorithm, which combines forecasts from DDWP models with different time steps through DA, improving the accuracy of forecasts at short intervals. To show the benefit and feasibility of each component, we use geopotential height at 500 hPa (Z500) from ERA5 reanalysis and examine the short-term forecast accuracy of specific setups of the DDWP framework. Results show that the spatial-transformer-based U-NET (U-STN) clearly outperforms the U-NET, e.g., improving the forecast skill by 45 %. Using a sigma-point ensemble Kalman (SPEnKF) algorithm for DA and U-STN as the forward model, we show that stable, accurate DA cycles are achieved even with high observation noise. This DDWP+DA framework substantially benefits from large (O(1000)) ensembles that are inexpensively generated with the data-driven forward model in each DA cycle. The multi-time-step DDWP+DA framework also shows promise; for example, it reduces the average error by factors of 2–3. These results show the benefits and feasibility of these three components, which are flexible and can be used in a variety of DDWP setups. Furthermore, while here we focus on weather forecasting, the three components can be readily adopted for other parts of the Earth system, such as ocean and land, for which there is a rapid growth of data and need for forecast and assimilation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗