Following an earthquake, ground motion time series are needed to carry out site-specific nonlinear response history analysis. However, the number of currently available recording instruments is sparse; thus, the ground motion time series at uninstrumented sites must be estimated. Tamhidi et al. developed a Gaussian process regression (GPR) model to generate ground motion time series given a set of recorded ground motions surrounding the target site. This GPR model interpolates the observed ground motions’ Fourier Transform coefficients to generate the target site’s Fourier spectrum and the corresponding time series. The robustness of the optimized hyperparameter of the model depends on the surrounding observation density. In this study, we carried out sensitivity analysis and tuned the hyperparameter of the GPR model for various observation densities. The 2019 M7.1 Ridgecrest and 2020 M4.5 South El Monte earthquake data sets recorded by the Community Seismic Network and California Integrated Seismic Network in Southern California are used to demonstrate the process. To provide a tool to quantify the uncertainty of the generated motions, a methodology to develop realizations of ground motion time series is also incorporated. The results illustrate that the uncertainty of the generated motions is lower at longer periods. It is shown that the observation density in the proximity of the target site plays a vital role in both error and uncertainty reduction of the generated time series. To demonstrate the concept, the effect of additional observations from combined recording networks is investigated.
more »
« less
SATELLITE DRAG COEFFICIENT MODELING AND ORBIT UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION USING STOCHASTIC MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES
The rapidly increasing congestion in the low Earth environment makes the modeling of uncertainty in atmospheric drag force a critical task, affecting space situational awareness (SSA) activities like the probability of collision estimation. A key element in atmospheric drag modeling is the assessment of uncertainty in the atmospheric drag coefficient estimate. While atmospheric drag coefficients for space objects with known characteristics can be computed numerically, they suffer from large computational costs for practical applications. In this work, we use cost-effective data-driven stochastic methods for modeling the drag coefficients of objects in the low Earth orbit (LEO) region. The training data is generated using the numerical Test Particle Monte Carlo (TPMC) method. TPMC is simulated with Cercignani–Lampis–Lord (CLL) gas-surface interaction (GSI) model. Mehta et al. [1] use a Gaussian process regression (GPR) model to predict satellite drag coefficient, but the authors did not estimate the predictive uncertainty. The first part of this research extends the work by Mehta et al. [1] by fitting a GPR model to the training data and performing predictive uncertainty estimation. The results of the Gaussian fit are then compared against a deep neural network (DNN) model aided by the Monte Carlo dropout approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use the aforementioned stochastic deep learning algorithm to perform predictive uncertainty estimation of the estimated satellite drag coefficient. Apart from the accuracy of the models, we also undertake the task of calibrating the models. Simulations are carried out for a spherical satellite followed by the Champ satellite. Finally, quantification of the effect of drag coefficient uncertainty on orbit prediction is carried out for different solar activity and geomagnetic activity levels.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1726534
- PAR ID:
- 10315463
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Astronomical Society meeting
- ISSN:
- 2152-887X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Machine learning (ML) has been applied to space weather problems with increasing frequency in recent years, driven by an influx of in-situ measurements and a desire to improve modeling and forecasting capabilities throughout the field. Space weather originates from solar perturbations and is comprised of the resulting complex variations they cause within the numerous systems between the Sun and Earth. These systems are often tightly coupled and not well understood. This creates a need for skillful models with knowledge about the confidence of their predictions. One example of such a dynamical system highly impacted by space weather is the thermosphere, the neutral region of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Our inability to forecast it has severe repercussions in the context of satellite drag and computation of probability of collision between two space objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) for decision making in space operations. Even with (assumed) perfect forecast of model drivers, our incomplete knowledge of the system results in often inaccurate thermospheric neutral mass density predictions. Continuing efforts are being made to improve model accuracy, but density models rarely provide estimates of confidence in predictions. In this work, we propose two techniques to develop nonlinear ML regression models to predict thermospheric density while providing robust and reliable uncertainty estimates: Monte Carlo (MC) dropout and direct prediction of the probability distribution, both using the negative logarithm of predictive density (NLPD) loss function. We show the performance capabilities for models trained on both local and global datasets. We show that the NLPD loss provides similar results for both techniques but the direct probability distribution prediction method has a much lower computational cost. For the global model regressed on the Space Environment Technologies High Accuracy Satellite Drag Model (HASDM) density database, we achieve errors of approximately 11% on independent test data with well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Using an in-situ CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) density dataset, models developed using both techniques provide test error on the order of 13%. The CHAMP models—on validation and test data—are within 2% of perfect calibration for the twenty prediction intervals tested. We show that this model can also be used to obtain global density predictions with uncertainties at a given epoch.more » « less
-
This paper addresses trajectory optimization for hypersonic vehicles under atmospheric and aerodynamic uncertainties using techniques from desensitized optimal control (DOC), wherein open-loop optimal controls are obtained by minimizing the sum of the standard objective function and a first-order penalty on trajectory variations due to parametric uncertainty. The proposed approach is demonstrated via numerical simulations of a minimum-final-time Earth reentry trajectory for an X-33 vehicle with an uncertain atmospheric scale height and drag coefficient. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that dispersions in the final position footprint and the final energy can be significantly reduced without closed-loop control and with little tradeoff in the performance metric set for the trajectory.more » « less
-
Abstract. Mesoscale dynamics in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region have been difficult to study from either ground- or satellite-based observations. For understanding of atmospheric coupling processes, important spatial scales at these altitudes range between tens and hundreds of kilometers in the horizontal plane. To date, this scale size is challenging observationally, so structures are usually parameterized in global circulation models. The advent of multistatic specular meteor radar networks allows exploration of MLT mesoscale dynamics on these scales using an increased number of detections and a diversity of viewing angles inherent to multistatic networks. In this work, we introduce a four-dimensional wind field inversion method that makes use of Gaussian process regression (GPR), which is a nonparametric and Bayesian approach. The method takes measured projected wind velocities and prior distributions of the wind velocity as a function of space and time, specified by the user or estimated from the data, and produces posterior distributions for the wind velocity. Computation of the predictive posterior distribution is performed on sampled points of interest and is not necessarily regularly sampled. The main benefits of the GPR method include this non-gridded sampling, the built-in statistical uncertainty estimates, and the ability to horizontally resolve winds on relatively small scales. The performance of the GPR implementation has been evaluated on Monte Carlo simulations with known distributions using the same spatial and temporal sampling as 1 d of real meteor measurements. Based on the simulation results we find that the GPR implementation is robust, providing wind fields that are statistically unbiased with statistical variances that depend on the geometry and are proportional to the prior velocity variances. A conservative and fast approach can be straightforwardly implemented by employing overestimated prior variances and distances, while a more robust but computationally intensive approach can be implemented by employing training and fitting of model hyperparameters. The latter GPR approach has been applied to a 24 h dataset and shown to compare well to previously used homogeneous and gradient methods. Small-scale features have reasonably low statistical uncertainties, implying geophysical wind field horizontal structures as low as 20–50 km. We suggest that this GPR approach forms a suitable method for MLT regional and weather studies.more » « less
-
McCulloch, R. (Ed.)Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited attention in massive data applications, mainly due to the prohibitively slow posterior computations using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. We address this problem using a divide-and-conquer Bayesian approach. We first create a large number of data subsamples with much smaller sizes. Then, we formulate the VCM as a linear mixed-effects model and develop a data augmentation algorithm for obtaining MCMC draws on all the subsets in parallel. Finally, we aggregate the MCMC-based estimates of subset posteriors into a single Aggregated Monte Carlo (AMC) posterior, which is used as a computationally efficient alternative to the true posterior distribution. Theoretically, we derive minimax optimal posterior convergence rates for the AMC posteriors of both the varying coefficients and the mean regression function. We provide quantification on the orders of subset sample sizes and the number of subsets. The empirical results show that the combination schemes that satisfy our theoretical assumptions, including the AMC posterior, have better estimation performance than their main competitors across diverse simulations and in a real data analysis.more » « less