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At least 73 records · Page 4

Emulating Nature: The Future of Sustainable Design with BIDARA

BIDARA (Bio-inspired Design and Research Assistant) is a GPT-4o chatbot that was instructed to help scientists and engineers understand, learn from, and emulate the strategies used by living things to create sustainable designs and technologies. BIDARA can guide users through the Biomimicry Institute’s Design Process, a step-by-step method to propose biomimetic solutions to challenges. This process includes defining the problem, biologizing the challenge, discovering natural models, abstracting design strategies, and emulating nature's lessons.

Brandon Ruffridge↗

STITCHES: creating new scenarios of climate model output by stitching together pieces of existing simulations

Abstract. Climate model output emulation has long been attempted to support impact research, mainly to fill in gaps in the scenario space. Given the computational cost of running coupled earth system models (ESMs), which are usually the domain of supercomputers and require on the order of days to weeks to complete a century-long simulation, only a handful of different scenarios are usually chosen to externally force ESM simulations. An effective emulator, able to run on standard computers in times of the order of minutes rather than days could therefore be used to derive climate information under scenarios that were not run by ESMs. Lately, the necessity of accounting for internal variability has also made the availability of initial-condition ensembles, under a specific scenario, important, further increasing the computational demand. At least so far, emulators have been limited to simplified ESM-like output, either seasonal, annual, or decadal averages of basic quantities, like temperature and precipitation, often emulated independently of one another. With this work, we propose a more comprehensive solution to ESM output emulation. Our emulator, STITCHES, uses existing archives of earth system models' (ESMs) scenario experiments to construct ESM-like output under new scenarios or enrich existing initial-condition ensembles, which is what other emulators also aim to do. Importantly, however, STITCHES' output has the same characteristics of the ESM output it sets out to emulate: multivariate, spatially resolved, and high frequency, representing both the forced component and the internal variability around it. STITCHES extends the idea of time sampling – according to which climate outcomes are stratified by the global warming level at which they manifest themselves, irrespective of the scenario and time at which they occur – to the construction of a continuous history of ESM-like output over the whole 21st century, consistent with a 21st-century trajectory of global surface air temperature (GSAT) derived from the scenario that has been chosen as the target of the emulation. STITCHES does so by first splitting the target GSAT trajectory into decade-long windows, then matching each window in turn to a decade-long window within an existing model simulation from the available scenario runs according to its proximity to the target in absolute size of the temperature anomaly and its rate of change. A look-up table is therefore created of a sequence of existing experiment–time-window combinations that, when stitched together, create a GSAT trajectory “similar” to the target. Importantly, we can then stitch together much more than GSAT from these windows, i.e., any output that the ESM has saved for these existing experiment–time-window combinations, at any frequency and spatial scale available in its archive. We show that the stitching does not introduce artifacts in the great majority of cases (we look at temperature and precipitation at monthly frequency and on the native grid of the ESM and at an index of ENSO activity, the Southern Oscillation Index). This is true even if the criteria for the identification of the decades to be stitched together are chosen to work for a smoothed time series of annual GSAT, a result we expect given the larger amount of noise affecting most other variables at finer spatial scales and higher frequencies, which therefore are more “forgiving” of the stitching. We successfully test the method's performance over many ESMs and scenarios. Only a few exceptions surface, but these less-than-optimal outcomes are always associated with a scarcity of the archived simulations from which we can gather the decade-long windows that form the building blocks of the emulated time series. In the great majority of cases, STITCHES' performance is satisfactory according to metrics that reward consistency in trends, interannual and inter-ensemble variance, and autocorrelation structure of the time series stitched together. The method therefore can be used to create ESM-like output according to new scenarios, on the basis of a trajectory of GSAT produced according to that scenario, which could be easily obtained by a simple climate model. It can also be used to increase the size of existing initial-condition ensembles. There are aspects of our emulator that will immediately disqualify it for specific applications, like when climate information is needed whose characteristics result from accumulated quantities over windows of times longer than those used as pieces by STITCHES, droughts longer than a decade for example. But for many applications, we argue that a stitched product can satisfy the climate information needs of impact researchers. STITCHES cannot emulate ESM output from scenarios that result in GSAT trajectories outside of the envelope available in the archive, nor can it emulate trajectories with shapes different from existing ones (overshoots with negative derivative, for example). Therefore, the size and characteristics of the available archives of ESM output are the principal limitations for STITCHES' deployment. Thus, we argue for the possibility of designing scenario experiments within, for example, the next phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project according to new principles, relieved of the need to produce a number of similar trajectories that vary only in radiative forcing strength but more strategically covering the space of temperature anomalies and rates of change.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Emulating inconsistencies in stratospheric aerosol injection

Abstract Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) would involve the addition of sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect part of the incoming solar radiation, thereby cooling the climate. Studies trying to explore the impacts of SAI have often focused on idealized scenarios without explicitly introducing what we call ‘inconsistencies’ in a deployment. A concern often discussed is what would happen to the climate system after an abrupt termination of its deployment, whether inadvertent or deliberate. However, there is a much wider range of plausible inconsistencies in deployment than termination that should be evaluated to better understand associated risks. In this work, we simulate a few representative inconsistencies in a pre-existing SAI scenario: an abrupt termination, a decade-long gradual phase-out, and 1 year and 2 year temporary interruptions of deployment. After examining their climate impacts, we use these simulations to train an emulator, and use this to project global mean temperature response for a broader set of inconsistencies in deployment. Our work highlights the capacity of a finite set of explicitly simulated scenarios that include inconsistencies to inform an emulator that is capable of expanding the space of scenarios that one might want to explore far more quickly and efficiently.

Farley, Jared (ORCID:0000000322062272)↗

Silicon ion radiation as a viable surrogate for emulating neutron radiation damage in silicates

Abstract Nuclear power plants are aging around the world, and a precise assessment of irradiation damage in their components is needed. One key component, concrete, and specifically the silicates in its aggregates, can undergo significant expansion upon neutron radiation, which can lead to cracking and, ultimately, structural failure. However, assessing and predicting the extent of damage via neutron radiation is challenging due to reasons such as residual radioactivity and, most importantly, the high time involved. Here, we evaluate whether ion radiation can be a viable surrogate. Specifically, by employing Si 2+ ion radiations and a comprehensive multi-modal imaging protocol, we report mineral-specific responses for key silicates such as quartz, albite, anorthite, and microcline. We find that 10 MeV Si 2+ ions result in mineral expansions that are remarkably comparable to neutron radiation equivalent expansions (R 2 = 0.86, RMSE = 1.29%), opening up pathways towards rapid assessment of silicates subject to irradiation.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Toward Accelerated Nuclear-physics Parameter Estimation from Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Emulators for the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff Equations

Abstract Gravitational-wave observations of binary neutron-star (BNS) mergers have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the nuclear equation of state (EOS) and the fundamental interactions that determine its properties. However, Bayesian parameter estimation frameworks do not typically sample over microscopic nuclear-physics parameters that determine the EOS. One of the major hurdles in doing so is the computational cost involved in solving the neutron-star structure equations, known as the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) equations. In this paper, we explore approaches to emulating solutions for the TOV equations: multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), Gaussian processes, and a data-driven variant of the reduced basis method (RBM). We implement these emulators for three different parameterizations of the nuclear EOS, each with a different degree of complexity represented by the number of model parameters. We find that our MLP-based emulators are generally more accurate than the other two algorithms, whereas the RBM results in the largest speedup with respect to the full high-fidelity TOV solver. We employ these emulators for a simple parameter inference using a potentially loud BNS observation and show that the posteriors predicted by our emulators are in excellent agreement with those obtained from the full TOV solver.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Evaluating climate emulation: fundamental impulse testing of simple climate models

Abstract. Simple climate models (SCMs) are numerical representations of the Earth's gas cycles and climate system. SCMs are easy to use and computationally inexpensive, making them an ideal tool in both scientific and decision-making contexts (e.g., complex climate model emulation, parameter estimation experiments, climate metric calculations, and probabilistic analyses). Despite their prolific use, the fundamental responses of SCMs are often not directly characterized. In this study, we use fundamental impulse tests of three chemical species (CO2, CH4, and black carbon – BC) to understand the fundamental gas cycle and climate system responses of several comprehensive (Hector v2.0, MAGICC 5.3, MAGICC 6.0) and idealized (FAIR v1.0, AR5-IR) SCMs. We find that while idealized SCMs are widely used, they fail to capture the magnitude and timescales of global mean climate responses under emissions perturbations, which can produce biased temperature results. Comprehensive SCMs, which have physically based nonlinear forcing and carbon cycle representations, show improved responses compared to idealized SCMs. Even the comprehensive SCMs, however, fail to capture the response timescales to BC emission perturbations seen recently in two general circulation models. Some comprehensive SCMs also generally respond faster than more complex models to a 4×CO2 concentration perturbation, although this was not evident for lower perturbation levels. These results suggest where improvements should be made to SCMs. Further, we demonstrate here a set of fundamental tests that we recommend as a standard evaluation suite for any SCM. Fundamental impulse tests allow users to understand differences in model responses and the impact of model selection on results.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Data Imbalance, Uncertainty Quantification, and Transfer Learning in Data‐Driven Parameterizations: Lessons From the Emulation of Gravity Wave Momentum Transport in WACCM

Abstract Neural networks (NNs) are increasingly used for data‐driven subgrid‐scale parameterizations in weather and climate models. While NNs are powerful tools for learning complex non‐linear relationships from data, there are several challenges in using them for parameterizations. Three of these challenges are (a) data imbalance related to learning rare, often large‐amplitude, samples; (b) uncertainty quantification (UQ) of the predictions to provide an accuracy indicator; and (c) generalization to other climates, for example, those with different radiative forcings. Here, we examine the performance of methods for addressing these challenges using NN‐based emulators of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) physics‐based gravity wave (GW) parameterizations as a test case. WACCM has complex, state‐of‐the‐art parameterizations for orography‐, convection‐, and front‐driven GWs. Convection‐ and orography‐driven GWs have significant data imbalance due to the absence of convection or orography in most grid points. We address data imbalance using resampling and/or weighted loss functions, enabling the successful emulation of parameterizations for all three sources. We demonstrate that three UQ methods (Bayesian NNs, variational auto‐encoders, and dropouts) provide ensemble spreads that correspond to accuracy during testing, offering criteria for identifying when an NN gives inaccurate predictions. Finally, we show that the accuracy of these NNs decreases for a warmer climate (4 × CO 2 ). However, their performance is significantly improved by applying transfer learning, for example, re‐training only one layer using ∼1% new data from the warmer climate. The findings of this study offer insights for developing reliable and generalizable data‐driven parameterizations for various processes, including (but not limited to) GWs.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Comparing emulation methods for a high‐resolution storm surge model

Abstract Realistic simulations of complex systems are fundamental for climate and environmental studies. Large computer systems are often not sufficient to run sophisticated computational models for large numbers of different input settings. Statistical surrogate models, or emulators, are key tools enabling fast exploration of the simulator input space. Gaussian processes have become standard for computer simulator emulation. However, they require careful implementation to scale appropriately, motivating alternative methods more recently introduced. We present a comparison study of surrogates of the Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes (SLOSH) simulator—the simulator of choice for government agencies—using four emulation approaches: BASS; BART; SEPIA; and RobustGaSP. SEPIA and RobustGaSP use Gaussian processes, BASS implements adaptive splines, and BART is based on ensembles of regression trees. We describe the four models and compare them in terms of computation time and predictive metrics. These surrogates use proven and distinct methodologies, are available through accessible software, and quantify prediction uncertainty. Our data cover millions of response values. We find that SEPIA and RobustGaSP provide exceptional predictive power, but cannot scale to emulate experiments as large as the one considered in this paper as effectively as BASS and BART.

Hutchings, Grant↗

Emulating aerosol optics with randomly generated neural networks

Abstract. Atmospheric aerosols have a substantial impact on climate and remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate prediction. Accurate representation of their direct radiative effects is a crucial component of modern climate models. However, direct computation of the radiative properties of aerosol populations is far too computationally expensive to perform in a climate model, so optical properties are typically approximated using a parameterization. This work develops artificial neural networks (ANNs) capable of replacing the current aerosol optics parameterization used in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). A large training dataset is generated by using Mie code to directly compute the optical properties of a range of atmospheric aerosol populations given a large variety of particle sizes, wavelengths, and refractive indices. Optimal neural architectures for shortwave and longwave bands are identified by evaluating ANNs with randomly generated wirings. Randomly generated deep ANNs are able to outperform conventional multilayer-perceptron-style architectures with comparable parameter counts. Finally, the ANN-based parameterization produces significantly more accurate bulk aerosol optical properties than the current parameterization when compared with direct Mie calculations using mean absolute error. The success of this approach makes possible the future inclusion of much more sophisticated representations of aerosol optics in climate models that cannot be captured by extension of the existing parameterization scheme and also demonstrates the potential of random-wiring-based neural architecture search in future applications in the Earth sciences.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗