Abstract. Geostatistical inverse modeling (GIM) has become a common approach to estimating greenhouse gas fluxes at the Earth's surface using atmospheric observations. GIMs are unique relative to other commonly used approaches because they do not require a single emissions inventory or a bottom–up model to serve as an initial guess of the fluxes. Instead, a modeler can incorporate a wide range of environmental, economic, and/or land use data to estimate the fluxes. Traditionally, GIMs have been paired with in situ observations that number in the thousands or tens of thousands. However, the number of available atmospheric greenhouse gas observations has been increasing enormously as the number of satellites, airborne measurement campaigns, and in situ monitoring stations continues to increase. This era of prolific greenhouse gas observations presents computational and statistical challenges for inverse modeling frameworks that have traditionally been paired with a limited number of in situ monitoring sites. In this article, we discuss the challenges of estimating greenhouse gas fluxes using large atmospheric datasets with a particular focus on GIMs. We subsequently discuss several strategies for estimating the fluxes and quantifying uncertainties, strategies that are adapted from hydrology, applied math, or other academic fields and are compatible with a wide variety of atmospheric models. We further evaluate the accuracy and computational burden of each strategy using a synthetic CO2 case study based upon NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite. Specifically, we simultaneously estimate a full year of 3-hourly CO2 fluxes across North America in one case study – a total of 9.4×106 unknown fluxes using 9.9×104 synthetic observations. The strategies discussed here provide accurate estimates of CO2 fluxes that are comparable to fluxes calculated directly or analytically. We are also able to approximate posterior uncertainties in the fluxes, but these approximations are, typically, an over- or underestimate depending upon the strategy employed and the degree of approximation required to make the calculations manageable.
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Computationally efficient methods for large-scale atmospheric inverse modeling
Abstract. Atmospheric inverse modeling describes the process of estimating greenhouse gas fluxes or air pollution emissions at the Earth's surface using observations of these gases collected in the atmosphere. The launch of new satellites, the expansion of surface observation networks, and a desire for more detailed maps of surface fluxes have yielded numerous computational and statistical challenges for standard inverse modeling frameworks that were often originally designed with much smaller data sets in mind. In this article, we discuss computationally efficient methods for large-scale atmospheric inverse modeling and focus on addressing some of the main computational and practical challenges. We develop generalized hybrid projection methods, which are iterative methods for solving large-scale inverse problems, and specifically we focus on the case of estimating surface fluxes. These algorithms confer several advantages. They are efficient, in part because they converge quickly, they exploit efficient matrix–vector multiplications, and they do not require inversion of any matrices. These methods are also robust because they can accurately reconstruct surface fluxes, they are automatic since regularization or covariance matrix parameters and stopping criteria can be determined as part of the iterative algorithm, and they are flexible because they can be paired with many different types of atmospheric models. We demonstrate the benefits of generalized hybrid methods with a case study from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite. We then address the more challenging problem of solving the inverse model when the mean of the surface fluxes is not known a priori; we do so by reformulating the problem, thereby extending the applicability of hybrid projection methods to include hierarchical priors. We further show that by exploiting mathematical relations provided by the generalized hybrid method, we can efficiently calculate an approximate posterior variance, thereby providing uncertainty information.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10342801
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geoscientific Model Development
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 1991-9603
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5547 to 5565
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract A grand challenge to solve a large-scale linear inverse problem (LIP) is to retain computational efficiency and accuracy regardless of the growth of the problem size. Despite the plenitude of methods available for solving LIPs, various challenges have emerged in recent times due to the sheer volume of data, inadequate computational resources to handle an oversized problem, security and privacy concerns, and the interest in the associated incremental or decremental problems. Removing these barriers requires a holistic upgrade of the existing methods to be computationally efficient, tractable, and equipped with scalable features. We, therefore, develop the parallel residual projection (PRP), a parallel computational framework involving the decomposition of a large-scale LIP into sub-problems of low complexity and the fusion of the sub-problem solutions to form the solution to the original LIP. We analyze the convergence properties of the PRP and accentuate its benefits through its application to complex problems of network inference and gravimetric survey. We show that any existing algorithm for solving an LIP can be integrated into the PRP framework and used to solve the sub-problems while handling the prevailing challenges.
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In uncertainty quantification, it is commonly required to solve a forward model consisting of a partial differential equation (PDE) with a spatially varying uncertain coefficient that is represented as an affine function of a set of random variables, or parameters. Discretizing such models using stochastic Galerkin finite element methods (SGFEMs) leads to very high-dimensional discrete problems that can be cast as linear multi-term matrix equations (LMTMEs). We develop efficient computational methods for approximating solutions of such matrix equations in low rank. To do this, we follow an alternating energy minimization (AEM) framework, wherein the solution is represented as a product of two matrices, and approximations to each component are sought by solving certain minimization problems repeatedly. Inspired by proper generalized decomposition methods, the iterative solution algorithms we present are based on a rank-adaptive variant of AEM methods that successively computes a rank-one solution component at each step. We introduce and evaluate new enhancement procedures to improve the accuracy of the approximations these algorithms deliver. The efficiency and accuracy of the enhanced AEM methods is demonstrated through numerical experiments with LMTMEs associated with SGFEM discretizations of parameterized linear elliptic PDEs.more » « less
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Summary This paper studies the performance of different algorithms for solving a dense symmetric indefinite linear system of equations on multicore CPUs with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). To ensure the numerical stability of the factorization,
pivoting is required. Obtaining high performance of such algorithms on the GPU is difficult because all the existing pivoting strategies lead to frequent synchronizations and irregular data accesses. Until recently, there has not been any implementation of these algorithms on a hybrid CPU/GPU architecture. To improve their performance on the hybrid architecture, we explore different techniques to reduce the expensive data transfer and synchronization between the CPU and GPU, or on the GPU (e.g., factorizing the matrix entirely on the GPU or in a communication‐avoiding fashion). We also study the performance of the solver using iterative refinements along with the factorization without pivoting combined with the preprocessing technique based on random butterfly transformations, or with the mixed‐precision algorithm where the matrix is factorized in single precision. This randomization algorithm only has a probabilistic proof on the numerical stability, and for this paper, we only focused on the mixed‐precision algorithm without pivoting. However, they demonstrate that we can obtain good performance on the GPU by avoiding the pivoting and using the lower precision arithmetics, respectively. As illustrated with the application in acoustics studied in this paper, in many practical cases, the matrices can be factorized without pivoting. Because the componentwise backward error computed in the iterative refinement signals when the algorithm failed to obtain the desired accuracy, the user can use these potentially unstable but efficient algorithms in most of the cases and fall back to a more stable algorithm with pivoting only in the case of the failure. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. -
In this manuscript, we present a multiscale Adaptive Reduced-Order Modeling (AROM) framework to efficiently simulate the response of heterogeneous composite microstructures under interfacial and volumetric damage. This framework builds on the eigendeformation-based reduced-order homogenization model (EHM), which is based on the transformation field analysis (TFA) and operates in the context of computational homogenization with a focus on model order reduction of the microscale problem. EHM pre-computes certain microstructure information by solving a series of linear elastic problems defined over the fully resolved microstructure (i.e., concentration tensors, interaction tensors) and approximates the microscale problem using a much smaller basis spanned over subdomains (also called parts) of the microstructure. Using this reduced basis, and prescribed spatial variation of inelastic response fields over the parts, the microscale problem leads to a set of algebraic equations with part-wise responses as unknowns, instead of node-wise displacements as in finite element analysis. The volumetric and interfacial influence functions are calculated by using the Interface enriched Generalized Finite Element Method (IGFEM) to compute the coefficient tensors, in which the finite element discretization does not need to conform to the material interfaces. AROM takes advantage of pre-computed coefficient tensors associated with the finest ROM and efficiently computes the coefficient tensors of a series of gradually coarsening ROMs. During the multiscale analysis stage, the simulation starts with a coarse ROM which can capture the initial elastic response well. As the loading continues and response in certain parts of the microstructure starts to localize, the analysis adaptively switches to the next level of refined ROM to better capture those local responses. The performance of AROM is evaluated by comparing the results with regular EHM (no adaptive refinement) and IGFEM under different loading conditions and failure modes for various 2D and 3D microstructures. The proposed AROM provides an efficient way to model history-dependent nonlinear responses for composite materials under localized interface failure and phase damage.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5547-2022
