Deep Emulators for Differentiation, Forecasting, and Parametrization in Earth Science Simulators

Abstract

To understand and predict large, complex and chaotic systems, Earth scientists build simulators from physical laws. Simulators generalize better to new scenarios, require fewer tunable parameters and are more interpretable than non-physical deep learning, but procedures for obtaining their derivatives with respect to their inputs are often unavailable. These missing derivatives limit the application of many important tools for forecasting, model tuning, sensitivity analysis or sub-grid-scale parametrization. Here we propose to overcome this limitation with deep emulator networks that learn to calculate the missing derivatives. By training directly on simulation data without analyzing source code or equations, this approach supports simulators in any programming language on any hardware without specialized routines for each case. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we train emulators on complete or partial system states of the chaotic Lorenz-96 simulator, and evaluate the accuracy of their dynamics and derivatives as a function of integration time and training dataset size. We further demonstrate that emulator-derived derivatives enable accurate 4D-Var data assimilation and closed-loop training of parametrizations. These results provide a basis for further combining the parsimony and generality of physical models with the power and flexibility of machine learning.