Ecosystems around the globe are experiencing changes in both the magnitude and fluctuations of environmental conditions due to land use and climate change. In response, ecologists are increasingly using near‐term, iterative ecological forecasts to predict how ecosystems will change in the future. To date, many near‐term, iterative forecasting systems have been developed using high temporal frequency (minute to hourly resolution) data streams for assimilation. However, this approach may be cost‐prohibitive or impossible for forecasting ecological variables that lack high‐frequency sensors or have high data latency (i.e., a delay before data are available for modeling after collection). To explore the effects of data assimilation frequency on forecast skill, we developed water temperature forecasts for a eutrophic drinking water reservoir and conducted data assimilation experiments by selectively withholding observations to examine the effect of data availability on forecast accuracy. We used in situ sensors, manually collected data, and a calibrated water quality ecosystem model driven by forecasted weather data to generate future water temperature forecasts using Forecasting Lake and Reservoir Ecosystems (FLARE), an open source water quality forecasting system. We tested the effect of daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly data assimilation on the skill of 1‐ to 35‐day‐ahead water temperature forecasts. We found that forecast skill varied depending on the season, forecast horizon, depth, and data assimilation frequency, but overall forecast performance was high, with a mean 1‐day‐ahead forecast root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.81°C, mean 7‐day RMSE of 1.15°C, and mean 35‐day RMSE of 1.94°C. Aggregated across the year, daily data assimilation yielded the most skillful forecasts at 1‐ to 7‐day‐ahead horizons, but weekly data assimilation resulted in the most skillful forecasts at 8‐ to 35‐day‐ahead horizons. Within a year, forecasts with weekly data assimilation consistently outperformed forecasts with daily data assimilation after the 8‐day forecast horizon during mixed spring/autumn periods and 5‐ to 14‐day‐ahead horizons during the summer‐stratified period, depending on depth. Our results suggest that lower frequency data (i.e., weekly) may be adequate for developing accurate forecasts in some applications, further enabling the development of forecasts broadly across ecosystems and ecological variables without high‐frequency sensor data.
Most environmental data come from a minority of well‐monitored sites. An ongoing challenge in the environmental sciences is transferring knowledge from monitored sites to unmonitored sites. Here, we demonstrate a novel transfer‐learning framework that accurately predicts depth‐specific temperature in unmonitored lakes (targets) by borrowing models from well‐monitored lakes (sources). This method, meta‐transfer learning (MTL), builds a meta‐learning model to predict transfer performance from candidate source models to targets using lake attributes and candidates' past performance. We constructed source models at 145 well‐monitored lakes using calibrated process‐based (PB) modeling and a recently developed approach called process‐guided deep learning (PGDL). We applied MTL to either PB or PGDL source models (PB‐MTL or PGDL‐MTL, respectively) to predict temperatures in 305 target lakes treated as unmonitored in the Upper Midwestern United States. We show significantly improved performance relative to the uncalibrated PB General Lake Model, where the median root mean squared error (RMSE) for the target lakes is 2.52°C. PB‐MTL yielded a median RMSE of 2.43°C; PGDL‐MTL yielded 2.16°C; and a PGDL‐MTL ensemble of nine sources per target yielded 1.88°C. For sparsely monitored target lakes, PGDL‐MTL often outperformed PGDL models trained on the target lakes themselves. Differences in maximum depth between the source and target were consistently the most important predictors. Our approach readily scales to thousands of lakes in the Midwestern United States, demonstrating that MTL with meaningful predictor variables and high‐quality source models is a promising approach for many kinds of unmonitored systems and environmental variables.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1934721
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10446508
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Water Resources Research
- Volume:
- 57
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0043-1397
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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