Climate impacts have broad economic, health, political, and national security ramifications. Societally relevant impacts are typically farther downstream, are the product of multiple interacting processes, and can arise over small regions and timeframes because their sources are short-term and localized. Short-term forcings (as can be seen in volcanic eruptions, climatic tipping points (e.g., the collapse of rainforests or the disappearance of sea ice), or in increasingly plausible climate interventions) fundamentally possess low signal-to-noise and could benefit from accounting for the multiple conditional processes through which a downstream impact arises. Under the Grand Challenge LDRD CLDERA (CLimate impacts: Discovering Etiology thRough pAthways), we have developed tools to enable downstream impact attribution from geographically and temporally localized source forcings in the climate. CLDERA developed methods that can distinguish how a localized source drives the climate system to respond with particular impacts. The how is embodied in pathways – the spatio-temporally evolving chain of physical processes that connects a source to a series of increasingly distant impacts. Novel analytic methods in pursuit of downstream impact attribution were developed and demonstrated on simulations and observations of the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. As described within this report we have • developed stratospheric expertise and aerosol modeling capabilities in E3SM, • created original methods to detect and model pathways from source-to-impact, and • advanced climate attribution through novel methods, cases, and approaches. Further, CLDERA developed a tiered verification process consisting of controlled datasets to prototype, verify, and refine the original method development. CLDERA increased Sandia’s footprint in the climate analytics community and developed new climate collaborations whilst also creating a cadre of climate analysts at Sandia. The products from CLDERA have been extensive with a total of 9 journal articles published, 12 articles submitted and under review, and an additional 8 articles in preparation. We have produced 1750 simulated years and developed 9 code-bases. This report details these accomplishments and serves as a summary of the work completed during the CLDERA Grand Challenge.
Our research was focused on forecasting the position and shape of the winter stratospheric polar vortex at a subseasonal timescale of 15 days in advance. To achieve this, we employed both statistical and neural network machine learning techniques. The analysis was performed on 42 winter seasons of reanalysis data provided by NASA giving us a total of 6,342 days of data. The state of the polar vortex for determined by using geometric moments to calculate the centroid latitude and the aspect ratio of an ellipse fit onto the vortex. Timeseries for thirty additional precursors were calculated to help improve the predictive capabilities of the algorithm. Feature importance of these precursors was performed using random forest to measure the predictive importance and the ideal number of precursors. Then, using the precursors identified as important, various statistical methods were tested for predictive accuracy with random forest and nearest neighbor performing the best. An echo state network, a type of recurrent neural network that features sparsely connected hidden layer and a reduced number of trainable parameters that allows for rapid training and testing, was also implemented for the forecasting problem. Hyperparameter tuning was performed for each methods using a subset of the training data. The algorithms were trained and tuned on the first 41 years of data, then tested for accuracy on the final year. In general, the centroid latitude of the polar vortex proved easier to predict than the aspect ratio across all algorithms. Random forest outperformed other statistical forecasting algorithms overall but struggled to predict extreme values. Forecasting from echo state network suggested a strong predictive capability past 15 days, but further work is required to fully realize the potential of recurrent neural network approaches.
Modeling of phenomena such as anomalous transport via fractional-order differential equations has been established as an effective alternative to partial differential equations, due to the inherent ability to describe large-scale behavior with greater efficiency than fully resolved classical models. In this review article, we first provide a broad overview of fractional-order derivatives with a clear emphasis on the stochastic processes that underlie their use. We then survey three exemplary application areas — subsurface transport, turbulence, and anomalous materials — in which fractional-order differential equations provide accurate and predictive models. For each area, we report on the evidence of anomalous behavior that justifies the use of fractional-order models, and survey both foundational models as well as more expressive state-of-the-art models. We also propose avenues for future research, including more advanced and physically sound models, as well as tools for calibration and discovery of fractional-order models.
Nonlocal models provide a much-needed predictive capability for important Sandia mission applications, ranging from fracture mechanics for nuclear components to subsurface flow for nuclear waste disposal, where traditional partial differential equations (PDEs) models fail to capture effects due to long-range forces at the microscale and mesoscale. However, utilization of this capability is seriously compromised by the lack of a rigorous nonlocal interface theory, required for both application and efficient solution of nonlocal models. To unlock the full potential of nonlocal modeling we developed a mathematically rigorous and physically consistent interface theory and demonstrate its scope in mission-relevant exemplar problems.
We develop a framework for Gaussian processes regression constrained by boundary value problems. The framework may be applied to infer the solution of a well-posed boundary value problem with a known second-order differential operator and boundary conditions, but for which only scattered observations of the source term are available. Scattered observations of the solution may also be used in the regression. The framework combines co-kriging with the linear transformation of a Gaussian process together with the use of kernels given by spectral expansions in eigenfunctions of the boundary value problem. Thus, it benefits from a reduced-rank property of covariance matrices. We demonstrate that the resulting framework yields more accurate and stable solution inference as compared to physics-informed Gaussian process regression without boundary condition constraints.
Deep operator learning has emerged as a promising tool for reduced-order modelling and PDE model discovery. Leveraging the expressive power of deep neural networks, especially in high dimensions, such methods learn the mapping between functional state variables. While proposed methods have assumed noise only in the dependent variables, experimental and numerical data for operator learning typically exhibit noise in the independent variables as well, since both variables represent signals that are subject to measurement error. In regression on scalar data, failure to account for noisy independent variables can lead to biased parameter estimates. With noisy independent variables, linear models fitted via ordinary least squares (OLS) will show attenuation bias, wherein the slope will be underestimated. In this work, we derive an analogue of attenuation bias for linear operator regression with white noise in both the independent and dependent variables, showing that the norm upper bound of the operator learned via OLS decreases with increasing noise in the independent variable. In the nonlinear setting, we computationally demonstrate underprediction of the action of the Burgers operator in the presence of noise in the independent variable. We propose error-in-variables (EiV) models for two operator regression methods, MOR-Physics and DeepONet, and demonstrate that these new models reduce bias in the presence of noisy independent variables for a variety of operator learning problems. Considering the Burgers operator in 1D and 2D, we demonstrate that EiV operator learning robustly recovers operators in high-noise regimes that defeat OLS operator learning. We also introduce an EiV model for time-evolving PDE discovery and show that OLS and EiV perform similarly in learning the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky evolution operator from corrupted data, suggesting that the effect of bias in OLS operator learning depends on the regularity of the target operator.
Nonlocal vector calculus, which is based on the nonlocal forms of gradient, divergence, and Laplace operators in multiple dimensions, has shown promising applications in fields such as hydrology, mechanics, and image processing. In this work, we study the analytical underpinnings of these operators. We rigorously treat compositions of nonlocal operators, prove nonlocal vector calculus identities, and connect weighted and unweighted variational frameworks. We combine these results to obtain a weighted fractional Helmholtz decomposition which is valid for sufficiently smooth vector fields. Our approach identifies the function spaces in which the stated identities and decompositions hold, providing a rigorous foundation to the nonlocal vector calculus identities that can serve as tools for nonlocal modeling in higher dimensions.
