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Satellite imagery is a readily available data source for monitoring a broad range of urban geographical contexts related to environmental, socio-demographic, and health disparities. To analyze satellite images, deep learning (DL) tools efficiently extract latent multi-dimensional characteristics, beyond identifying specific urban elements like roads and houses. However, current DL approaches tend to largely rely on Convolutional Neural Networks applied to high-resolution imagery, and as such may be limited to capturing only local contextual information. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose to fuse the modalities of satellite imagery and a large language model (LLM). In particular, we develop a novel LLM-based Simplicial Contrastive Learning model (LLM-SCL) based on mutual information maximization between the latent simplicial complex-level representations of two kinds of augmented (superpixel) graphs, which allows for cohesive integration of LLM prompts and learning of both local and global higher-order properties of satellite imagery (from all pixels in an image). Extensive experiments on satellite imagery at several resolutions in Tijuana, Mexico, Los Angeles and San Diego, USA, suggest that LLM-SCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on unsupervised image classification tasks. As such, the proposed LLM-SCL opens a new path for more accurate evaluations of latent urban forms and their associations with environmental and health outcome disparities. 

In regions of the world where topography varies significantly with distance, most global climate models (GCMs) have spatial resolutions that are too coarse to accurately simulate key meteorological variables that are influenced by topography, such as clouds, precipitation, and surface temperatures. One approach to tackle this challenge is to run climate models of sufficiently high resolution in those topographically complex regions such as the North American Regionally Refined Model (NARRM) subset of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2 (E3SM v2). Although high-resolution simulations are expected to provide unprecedented details of atmospheric processes, running models at such high resolutions remains computationally expensive compared to lower-resolution models such as the E3SM Low Resolution (LR). Moreover, because regionally refined and high-resolution GCMs are relatively new, there are a limited number of observational datasets and frameworks available for evaluating climate models with regionally varying spatial resolutions. As such, we developed a new framework to quantify the added value of high spatial resolution in simulating precipitation over the contiguous United States (CONUS). To determine its viability, we applied the framework to two model simulations and an observational dataset. We first remapped all the data into Hierarchical Equal-Area Iso-Latitude Pixelization (HEALPix) pixels. HEALPix offers several mathematical properties that enable seamless evaluation of climate models across different spatial resolutions including its equal-area and partitioning properties. The remapped HEALPix-based data are used to show how the spatial variability of both observed and simulated precipitation changes with resolution increases. This study provides valuable insights into the requirements for achieving accurate simulations of precipitation patterns over the CONUS. It highlights the importance of allocating sufficient computational resources to run climate models at higher temporal and spatial resolutions to capture spatial patterns effectively. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the effectiveness of the HEALPix framework in evaluating precipitation simulations across different spatial resolutions. This framework offers a viable approach for comparing observed and simulated data when dealing with datasets of varying spatial resolutions. By employing this framework, researchers can extend its usage to other climate variables, datasets, and disciplines that require comparing datasets with different spatial resolutions.