The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. The spatio-temporal nature of the climate system motivates the adaptation of super-resolution image processing techniques to statistical downscaling. In our work, we present DeepSD, a generalized stacked super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) framework with multi-scale input channels for statistical downscaling of climate variables. A comparison of DeepSD to four state-of-the-art methods downscaling daily precipitation from 1 degree (~100km) to 1/8 degrees (~12.5km) over the Continental United States. Furthermore, a framework using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform is discussed for downscaling more than 20 ESM models with multiple emission scenarios.
more »
« less
CMIP7 data request: impacts and adaptation priorities and opportunities
Abstract. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 7 (CMIP7) undertook an extensive process to gather community input and refine data requests related to impacts and adaptation applications of Earth System Model (ESM) outputs. The Impacts and Adaptation (I&A) Data Request Team worked with CMIP7 leadership to distribute an open solicitation across many communities that use climate model outputs requesting inputs for new and existing variables, the most applicable temporal characteristics, and groupings of variables that together allow for specific application opportunities. This input was then collated and translated into CMIP7 standard templates for inclusion in the broader data request, leading to 13 I&A data request opportunities, 60 variable groups and 539 unique variables sought by vulnerability, impacts, adaptation, and climate services user communities. Here, we describe these opportunities and variable groups, as well as new insights into how ESM groups can prioritize outputs that set off a chain of further analyses, ultimately informing decisions impacting society and natural systems. These include an emphasis on high-resolution outputs to allow further modeling of climate impacts at regional and local scales, improved representation of extreme weather events, enhanced accuracy of downscaling and bias-adjustment techniques, and support for more detailed assessments for decision-making in adaptation and mitigation strategies. There is also broad interest in more extensive provisioning of two-dimensional variables at the Earth's surface, prioritizing experiments that enhance our understanding of both the recent past and future scenarios, and providing outputs that allow further downscaling and bias adjustment. We emphasize that variable groups are the fundamental level at which to engage with the I&A data request, matching the scale of input and the way output provision enables specific I&A applications. Given resource constraints, we applaud CMIP7 efforts to foster strong engagement and communication between ESM groups and the I&A team to build consensus around prudent compromises in priority variables, temporal resolutions, simulation experiments, time subsets, and ensemble members.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2145362
- PAR ID:
- 10659670
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Copernicus Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geoscientific Model Development
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 23
- ISSN:
- 1991-9603
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 9497 to 9540
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Climate data from Earth System Models are increasingly being used to study the impacts of climate change on a broad range of biogeophysical (forest fires, fisheries, etc.) and human systems (reservoir operations, urban heat waves, etc.). Before this data can be used to study many of these systems, post-processing steps commonly referred to as bias correction and statistical downscaling must be performed. “Bias correction” is used to correct persistent biases in climate model output and “statistical downscaling” is used to increase the spatiotemporal resolution of the model output (i.e. 1 deg to 1/16th deg grid boxes). For our purposes, we’ll refer to both parts as “downscaling”. In the past few decades, the applications community has developed a plethora of downscaling methods. Many of these methods are ad-hoc collections of post processing routines while others target very specific applications. The proliferation of downscaling methods has left the climate applications community with an overwhelming body of research to sort through without much in the form of synthesis guiding method selection or applicability. Motivated by the pressing socio-environmental challenges of climate change – and with the learnings from previous downscaling efforts in mind – we have begun working on a community-centered open framework for climate downscaling: scikit-downscale. We believe that the community will benefit from the presence of a well-designed open source downscaling toolbox with standard interfaces alongside a repository of benchmark data to test and evaluate new and existing downscaling methods. In this notebook, we provide an overview of the scikit-downscale project, detailing how it can be used to downscale a range of surface climate variables such as air temperature and precipitation. We also highlight how scikit-downscale framework is being used to compare existing methods and how it can be extended to support the development of new downscaling methods.more » « less
-
Climate and weather data such as precipitation derived from Global Climate Models (GCMs) and satellite observations are essential for the global and local hydrological assessment. However, most climatic popular precipitation products (with spatial resolutions coarser than 10km) are too coarse for local impact studies and require “downscaling” to obtain higher resolutions. Traditional precipitation downscaling methods such as statistical and dynamic downscaling require an input of additional meteorological variables, and very few are applicable for downscaling hourly precipitation for higher spatial resolution. Based on dynamic dictionary learning, we propose a new downscaling method, PreciPatch, to address this challenge by producing spatially distributed higher resolution precipitation fields with only precipitation input from GCMs at hourly temporal resolution and a large geographical extent. Using aggregated Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of PreciPatch, in comparison with bicubic interpolation using RainFARM—a stochastic downscaling method, and DeepSD—a Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) based downscaling method. PreciPatch demonstrates better performance than other methods for downscaling short-duration precipitation events (used historical data from 2014 to 2017 as the training set to estimate high-resolution hourly events in 2018).more » « less
-
After selection with the Group LASSO (or generalized variants such as the overlapping, sparse, or standardized Group LASSO), inference for the selected parameters is unreliable in the absence of adjustments for selection bias. In the penalized Gaussian regression setup, existing approaches provide adjustments for selection events that can be expressed as linear inequalities in the data variables. Such a representation, however, fails to hold for selection with the Group LASSO and substantially obstructs the scope of subsequent post-selective inference. Key questions of inferential interest—for example, inference for the effects of selected variables on the outcome—remain unanswered. In the present paper, we develop a consistent, post-selective, Bayesian method to address the existing gaps by deriving a likelihood adjustment factor and an approximation thereof that eliminates bias from the selection of groups. Experiments on simulated data and data from the Human Connectome Project demonstrate that our method recovers the effects of parameters within the selected groups while paying only a small price for bias adjustment.more » « less
-
As climate change threatens species' persistence, predicting the potential for species to adapt to rapidly changing environments is imperative for the development of effective conservation strategies. Eco-evolutionary individual-based models (IBMs) can be useful tools for achieving this objective. We performed a literature review to identify studies that apply these tools in marine systems. Our survey suggested that this is an emerging area of research fuelled in part by developments in modelling frameworks that allow simulation of increasingly complex ecological, genetic and demographic processes. The studies we identified illustrate the promise of this approach and advance our understanding of the capacity for adaptation to outpace climate change. These studies also identify limitations of current models and opportunities for further development. We discuss three main topics that emerged across studies: (i) effects of genetic architecture and non-genetic responses on adaptive potential; (ii) capacity for gene flow to facilitate rapid adaptation; and (iii) impacts of multiple stressors on persistence. Finally, we demonstrate the approach using simple simulations and provide a framework for users to explore eco-evolutionary IBMs as tools for understanding adaptation in changing seas.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

