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Title: A Physics-Informed, Machine Learning Emulator of a 2D Surface Water Model: What Temporal Networks and Simulation-Based Inference Can Help Us Learn about Hydrologic Processes
While machine learning approaches are rapidly being applied to hydrologic problems, physics-informed approaches are still relatively rare. Many successful deep-learning applications have focused on point estimates of streamflow trained on stream gauge observations over time. While these approaches show promise for some applications, there is a need for distributed approaches that can produce accurate two-dimensional results of model states, such as ponded water depth. Here, we demonstrate a 2D emulator of the Tilted V catchment benchmark problem with solutions provided by the integrated hydrology model ParFlow. This emulator model can use 2D Convolution Neural Network (CNN), 3D CNN, and U-Net machine learning architectures and produces time-dependent spatial maps of ponded water depth from which hydrographs and other hydrologic quantities of interest may be derived. A comparison of different deep learning architectures and hyperparameters is presented with particular focus on approaches such as 3D CNN (that have a time-dependent learning component) and 2D CNN and U-Net approaches (that use only the current model state to predict the next state in time). In addition to testing model performance, we also use a simplified simulation based inference approach to evaluate the ability to calibrate the emulator to randomly selected simulations and the match between ML calibrated input parameters and underlying physics-based simulation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2040542
PAR ID:
10336011
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Water
Volume:
13
Issue:
24
ISSN:
2073-4441
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3633
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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