论文标题
通过可解释的神经网络确定熟练天气预测的机会
Identifying Opportunities for Skillful Weather Prediction with Interpretable Neural Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
气氛混乱。气候系统的这种基本属性使预测的天气令人难以置信的挑战:不可能期望天气模型对大约2周的时间尺度以外的地球系统提供完美的预测。取而代之的是,大气科学家寻找的是气候系统的特定状态,这些状态比其他人更可预测的行为。在这里,我们演示了如何使用神经网络,不仅利用这些状态来做出熟练的预测,而且还可以确定导致可预测性增强的气候条件。此外,我们采用一种称为``层相关性传播''的神经网络可解释性方法来创建与网络输出最相关的输入中区域的热图。对于地球科学家来说,这些有关神经网络预测的相关区域是我们研究中最重要的产品:它们提供了对物理机制的科学见解,从而导致天气可预测性增强。尽管我们展示了大气科学领域的方法,但该方法适用于各种地球科学问题。
The atmosphere is chaotic. This fundamental property of the climate system makes forecasting weather incredibly challenging: it's impossible to expect weather models to ever provide perfect predictions of the Earth system beyond timescales of approximately 2 weeks. Instead, atmospheric scientists look for specific states of the climate system that lead to more predictable behaviour than others. Here, we demonstrate how neural networks can be used, not only to leverage these states to make skillful predictions, but moreover to identify the climatic conditions that lead to enhanced predictability. Furthermore, we employ a neural network interpretability method called ``layer-wise relevance propagation'' to create heatmaps of the regions in the input most relevant for a network's output. For Earth scientists, these relevant regions for the neural network's prediction are by far the most important product of our study: they provide scientific insight into the physical mechanisms that lead to enhanced weather predictability. While we demonstrate our approach for the atmospheric science domain, this methodology is applicable to a large range of geoscientific problems.