Manmeet Singh

Harsh G. Kamath, Manmeet Singh, Neetiraj Malviya et al.

We introduce University of Texas - Global Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS), a dataset providing building heights and urban canopy parameters (UCPs) for more than 1200 cities or locales worldwide. UT-GLOBUS combines open-source spaceborne altimetry (ICESat-2 and GEDI) and coarse-resolution urban canopy elevation data with a machine-learning model to estimate building-level information. Validation using LiDAR data from six US cities showed UT-GLOBUS-derived building heights had a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 9.1 meters. Validation of mean building heights within 1-km^2 grid cells, including data from Hamburg and Sydney, resulted in an RMSE of 7.8 meters. Testing the UCPs in the urban Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-Urban) model resulted in a significant improvement (55% in RMSE) in intra-urban air temperature representation compared to the existing table-based local climate zone approach in Houston, TX. Additionally, we demonstrated the dataset's utility for simulating heat mitigation strategies and building energy consumption using WRF-Urban, with test cases in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. Street-scale mean radiant temperature simulations using the Solar and LongWave Environmental Irradiance Geometry (SOLWEIG) model, incorporating UT-GLOBUS and LiDAR-derived building heights, confirmed the dataset's effectiveness in modeling human thermal comfort in Baltimore, MD (daytime RMSE = 2.85 C). Thus, UT-GLOBUS can be used for modeling urban hazards with significant socioeconomic and biometeorological risks, enabling finer scale urban climate simulations and overcoming previous limitations due to the lack of building information.

Saptarishi Dhanuka, Sarvesh Iyer, Manmeet Singh et al.

Recent advances in machine learning have produced probabilistic weather forecasting models comparable to state-of-the-art numerical weather predictors. But no model consistently dominates spatio-temporally, and relative performance is highly context-dependent. This motivates adaptive methods for combining multiple forecasts to obtain improvements and robustness. While combined forecasts have been proposed in the literature, these are achieved either through supervised learning or through prediction with expert advice methods. We introduce AdaWeather, an adaptive framework that combines many probabilistic forecasts using both machine learning as well as mixture of experts to arrive at a unified improved probabilistic forecast. While traditional expert methods develop the regret bounds with respect to the best single expert in hindsight, we extend the algorithm and analysis to show our method has logarithmic regret compared to the best static mixture of experts in hindsight. Empirically, we focus on forecasting temperature, and observe improvements over existing methods.

Sifatkaur Dhingra, Manmeet Singh, Vaisakh SB et al.

Cognitive psychology delves on understanding perception, attention, memory, language, problem-solving, decision-making, and reasoning. Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as potent tools increasingly capable of performing human-level tasks. The recent development in the form of GPT-4 and its demonstrated success in tasks complex to humans exam and complex problems has led to an increased confidence in the LLMs to become perfect instruments of intelligence. Although GPT-4 report has shown performance on some cognitive psychology tasks, a comprehensive assessment of GPT-4, via the existing well-established datasets is required. In this study, we focus on the evaluation of GPT-4's performance on a set of cognitive psychology datasets such as CommonsenseQA, SuperGLUE, MATH and HANS. In doing so, we understand how GPT-4 processes and integrates cognitive psychology with contextual information, providing insight into the underlying cognitive processes that enable its ability to generate the responses. We show that GPT-4 exhibits a high level of accuracy in cognitive psychology tasks relative to the prior state-of-the-art models. Our results strengthen the already available assessments and confidence on GPT-4's cognitive psychology abilities. It has significant potential to revolutionize the field of AI, by enabling machines to bridge the gap between human and machine reasoning.

Manmeet Singh, Vaisakh S B, Nachiketa Acharya et al.

Precipitation governs Earth's hydroclimate, and its daily spatiotemporal fluctuations have major socioeconomic effects. Advances in Numerical weather prediction (NWP) have been measured by the improvement of forecasts for various physical fields such as temperature and pressure; however, large biases exist in precipitation prediction. We augment the output of the well-known NWP model CFSv2 with deep learning to create a hybrid model that improves short-range global precipitation at 1-, 2-, and 3-day lead times. To hybridise, we address the sphericity of the global data by using modified DLWP-CS architecture which transforms all the fields to cubed-sphere projection. Dynamical model precipitation and surface temperature outputs are fed into a modified DLWP-CS (UNET) to forecast ground truth precipitation. While CFSv2's average bias is +5 to +7 mm/day over land, the multivariate deep learning model decreases it to within -1 to +1 mm/day. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Ivan in 2004, China floods in 2010, India floods in 2005, and Myanmar storm Nargis in 2008 are used to confirm the substantial enhancement in the skill for the hybrid dynamical-deep learning model. CFSv2 typically shows a moderate to large bias in the spatial pattern and overestimates the precipitation at short-range time scales. The proposed deep learning augmented NWP model can address these biases and vastly improve the spatial pattern and magnitude of predicted precipitation. Deep learning enhanced CFSv2 reduces mean bias by 8x over important land regions for 1 day lead compared to CFSv2. The spatio-temporal deep learning system opens pathways to further the precision and accuracy in global short-range precipitation forecasts.

Bipin Kumar, Kaustubh Atey, Bhupendra Bahadur Singh et al.

Deep Learning (DL) based downscaling has become a popular tool in earth sciences recently. Increasingly, different DL approaches are being adopted to downscale coarser precipitation data and generate more accurate and reliable estimates at local (~few km or even smaller) scales. Despite several studies adopting dynamical or statistical downscaling of precipitation, the accuracy is limited by the availability of ground truth. A key challenge to gauge the accuracy of such methods is to compare the downscaled data to point-scale observations which are often unavailable at such small scales. In this work, we carry out the DL-based downscaling to estimate the local precipitation data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), which was created by approximating the value from station location to a grid point. To test the efficacy of different DL approaches, we apply four different methods of downscaling and evaluate their performance. The considered approaches are (i) Deep Statistical Downscaling (DeepSD), augmented Convolutional Long Short Term Memory (ConvLSTM), fully convolutional network (U-NET), and Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SR-GAN). A custom VGG network, used in the SR-GAN, is developed in this work using precipitation data. The results indicate that SR-GAN is the best method for precipitation data downscaling. The downscaled data is validated with precipitation values at IMD station. This DL method offers a promising alternative to statistical downscaling.

Manmeet Singh, Nachiketa Acharya, Sajad Jamshidi et al.

Urban downscaling is a link to transfer the knowledge from coarser climate information to city scale assessments. These high-resolution assessments need multiyear climatology of past data and future projections, which are complex and computationally expensive to generate using traditional numerical weather prediction models. The city of Austin, Texas, USA has seen tremendous growth in the past decade. Systematic planning for the future requires the availability of fine resolution city-scale datasets. In this study, we demonstrate a novel approach generating a general purpose operator using deep learning to perform urban downscaling. The algorithm employs an iterative super-resolution convolutional neural network (Iterative SRCNN) over the city of Austin, Texas, USA. We show the development of a high-resolution gridded precipitation product (300 m) from a coarse (10 km) satellite-based product (JAXA GsMAP). High resolution gridded datasets of precipitation offer insights into the spatial distribution of heavy to low precipitation events in the past. The algorithm shows improvement in the mean peak-signal-to-noise-ratio and mutual information to generate high resolution gridded product of size 300 m X 300 m relative to the cubic interpolation baseline. Our results have implications for developing high-resolution gridded-precipitation urban datasets and the future planning of smart cities for other cities and other climatic variables.

Moumita Bhowmik, Manmeet Singh, Suryachandra Rao et al.

Simulation of turbulent flows, especially at the edges of clouds in the atmosphere, is an inherently challenging task. Hitherto, the best possible computational method to perform such experiments is the Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). DNS involves solving non-linear partial differential equations for fluid flows, also known as Navier-Stokes equations, on discretized grid boxes in a three-dimensional space. It is a valuable paradigm that has guided the numerical weather prediction models to compute rainfall formation. However, DNS cannot be performed for large domains of practical utility to the weather forecast community. Here, we introduce DeepClouds.ai, a 3D-UNET that simulates the outputs of a rising cloud DNS experiment. The problem of increasing the domain size in DNS is addressed by mapping an inner 3D cube to the complete 3D cube from the output of the DNS discretized grid simulation. Our approach effectively captures turbulent flow dynamics without having to solve the complex dynamical core. The baseline shows that the deep learning-based simulation is comparable to the partial-differential equation-based model as measured by various score metrics. This framework can be used to further the science of turbulence and cloud flows by enabling simulations over large physical domains in the atmosphere. It would lead to cascading societal benefits by improved weather predictions via advanced parameterization schemes.

Somnath Luitel, Manmeet Singh, Joshua Durkee et al.

Operational weather prediction at kilometer scales remains computationally prohibitive for traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, limiting forecast access for applications in energy, agriculture, and disaster management that require fine-grained spatiotemporal detail. Here we introduce AirCast-SR, a foundation model for atmospheric super-resolution that downscales global AI weather forecasts from 0.25 degree (~28 km) to 1 km horizontal resolution at hourly temporal resolution, producing 67-hour forecasts of eight coupled surface variables simultaneously. EarthMind-SR employs a three-dimensional U-Net conditioned within a Latent Consistency Model (LCM) diffusion framework, trained on patch-based samples over the contiguous United States (CONUS) using GraphCast forecasts as input and NOAA's Analysis of Record for Calibration (AORC) as the target. The model achieves near-zero bias across all variables and lead times, and its radial power spectral density analysis demonstrates preservation of fine-scale atmospheric structure at wavelengths of 10 km to 100 km where coarser models lose spectral power. We validate EarthMind-SR across three CONUS case studies spanning winter, summer, and spring seasons, and demonstrate zero-shot global transferability over India and Germany using independent surface station observations without any retraining or fine-tuning. As an open-weights foundation model, EarthMind-SR establishes a new paradigm for kilometer-scale AI weather prediction and provides a platform for regional fine-tuning, distillation, and downstream applications in climate services and hazard forecasting.

Prabhjot Singh, Manmeet Singh

Operational phase unwrapping is the primary computational bottleneck in InSAR-based volcanic and seismic monitoring. We challenge the industry trend of adopting high-complexity computer vision architectures, such as attention mechanisms, without validating their suitability for physics-constrained geophysical regression. We present the first large-scale architectural ablation study on a global LiCSAR benchmark (20 frames, 39,724 patches, 651M pixels). Our results reveal a significant "complexity penalty": a vanilla U-Net (7.76M parameters) achieves $R^2=0.834$ and RMSE $= 1.01$ cm, outperforming 11.37M-parameter attention-based models by 34% in $R^2$ and 51% in RMSE. Power Spectral Density (PSD) analysis provides the physical justification: while attention excels at capturing sharp semantic edges in natural images, it injects unphysical high-frequency artifacts ($>0.3$ cycles/pixel) into geophysical fields, violating the fundamental smoothness constraints of elastic surface deformation. With a 2.92ms inference latency (a $2.5\times$ speedup), the vanilla U-Net is the only candidate to comfortably meet the sub-100ms requirement for operational early-warning systems. This work bridges the "publication-to-practice" gap by proving that convolutional locality outperforms modern complexity for smooth-field regression, advocating for physics-informed simplicity in ML4RS. Code available at https://github.com/prabhjotschugh/When-Less-is-More-InSAR-Phase-Unwrapping

Mriganka Sekhar Biswas, Manmeet Singh

Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one one of the most important trace gas in the atmosphere, as it is a pollutant causing respiratory and other diseases. It is also a precursor of tropospheric ozone which damages crops and deteriorates human health. Study of HCHO chemistry and long-term monitoring using satellite data is important from the perspective of human health, food security and air pollution. Dynamic atmospheric chemistry models struggle to simulate atmospheric formaldehyde and often overestimate by up to two times relative to satellite observations and reanalysis. Spatial distribution of modelled HCHO also fail to match satellite observations. Here, we present deep learning approach using a simple super-resolution based convolutional neural network towards simulating fast and reliable atmospheric HCHO. Our approach is an indirect method of HCHO estimation without the need to chemical equations. We find that deep learning outperforms dynamical model simulations which involves complicated atmospheric chemistry representation. Causality establishing the nonlinear relationships of different variables to target formaldehyde is established in our approach by using a variety of precursors from meteorology and chemical reanalysis to target OMI AURA satellite based HCHO predictions. We choose South Asia for testing our implementation as it doesnt have in situ measurements of formaldehyde and there is a need for improved quality data over the region. Moreover, there are spatial and temporal data gaps in the satellite product which can be removed by trustworthy modelling of atmospheric formaldehyde. This study is a novel attempt using computer vision for trustworthy modelling of formaldehyde from remote sensing can lead to cascading societal benefits.

Shubham Ghosal, Manmeet Singh, Sachin Ghude et al.

This study presents an innovative approach to creating a dynamic, AI based emission inventory system for use with the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF Chem), designed to simulate vehicular and other anthropogenic emissions at satellite detectable resolution. The methodology leverages state of the art deep learning based computer vision models, primarily employing YOLO (You Only Look Once) architectures (v8 to v10) and T Rex, for high precision object detection. Through extensive data collection, model training, and finetuning, the system achieved significant improvements in detection accuracy, with F1 scores increasing from an initial 0.15 at 0.131 confidence to 0.72 at 0.414 confidence. A custom pipeline converts model outputs into netCDF files storing latitude, longitude, and vehicular count data, enabling real time processing and visualization of emission patterns. The resulting system offers unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution in emission estimates, facilitating more accurate short term air quality forecasts and deeper insights into urban emission dynamics. This research not only enhances WRF Chem simulations but also bridges the gap between AI technologies and atmospheric science methodologies, potentially improving urban air quality management and environmental policymaking. Future work will focus on expanding the system's capabilities to non vehicular sources and further improving detection accuracy in challenging environmental conditions.

Mehzooz Nizar, Jha K. Ambuj, Manmeet Singh et al.

The knowledge of type of precipitating cloud is crucial for radar based quantitative estimates of precipitation. We propose a novel model called CloudSense which uses machine learning to accurately identify the type of precipitating clouds over the complex terrain locations in the Western Ghats (WGs) of India. CloudSense uses vertical reflectivity profiles collected during July-August 2018 from an X-band radar to classify clouds into four categories namely stratiform,mixed stratiform-convective,convective and shallow clouds. The machine learning(ML) model used in CloudSense was trained using a dataset balanced by Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), with features selected based on physical characteristics relevant to different cloud types. Among various ML models evaluated Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) demonstrate superior performance in classifying cloud types with a BAC of 0.8 and F1-Score of 0.82. CloudSense generated results are also compared against conventional radar algorithms and we find that CloudSense performs better than radar algorithms. For 200 samples tested, the radar algorithm achieved a BAC of 0.69 and F1-Score of 0.68, whereas CloudSense achieved a BAC and F1-Score of 0.77. Our results show that ML based approach can provide more accurate cloud detection and classification which would be useful to improve precipitation estimates over the complex terrain of the WG.

Niraj Chaudhari, Manmeet Singh, Naveen Sudharsan et al.

Data fusion is an essential task in various domains, enabling the integration of multi-source information to enhance data quality and insights. One key application is in satellite remote sensing, where fusing multi-sensor observations can improve spatial and temporal resolution. In this study, we explore the design space of diffusion and flow models for data fusion, focusing on the integration of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nighttime lights data. Our approach leverages a diverse set of 2D image-to-image generative models, including UNET, diffusion, and flow modeling architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness of these architectures in satellite remote sensing data fusion, identifying diffusion models based on UNet as particularly adept at preserving fine-grained spatial details and generating high-fidelity fused images. We also provide guidance on the selection of noise schedulers in diffusion-based models, highlighting the trade-offs between iterative solvers for faster inference and discrete schedulers for higher-quality reconstructions. Additionally, we explore quantization techniques to optimize memory efficiency and computational cost without compromising performance. Our findings offer practical insights into selecting the most effective diffusion and flow model architectures for data fusion tasks, particularly in remote sensing applications, and provide recommendations for leveraging noise scheduling strategies to enhance fusion quality.

Naveen Sudharsan, Manmeet Singh, Harsh Kamath et al.

The UT GraphCast Hindcast Dataset from 1979 to 2024 is a comprehensive global weather forecast archive generated using the Google DeepMind GraphCast Operational model. Developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin under the WCRP umbrella, this dataset provides daily 15 day deterministic forecasts at 00UTC on an approximately 25 km global grid for a 45 year period. GraphCast is a physics informed graph neural network that was trained on ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis. It predicts more than a dozen key atmospheric and surface variables on 37 vertical levels, delivering a full medium range forecast in under one minute on modern hardware.

Sukhpal Singh Gill, Minxian Xu, Panos Patros et al.

ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot, was released to provide coherent and useful replies based on analysis of large volumes of data. In this article, leading scientists, researchers and engineers discuss the transformative effects of ChatGPT on modern education. This research seeks to improve our knowledge of ChatGPT capabilities and its use in the education sector, identifying potential concerns and challenges. Our preliminary evaluation concludes that ChatGPT performed differently in each subject area including finance, coding and maths. While ChatGPT has the ability to help educators by creating instructional content, offering suggestions and acting as an online educator to learners by answering questions and promoting group work, there are clear drawbacks in its use, such as the possibility of producing inaccurate or false data and circumventing duplicate content (plagiarism) detectors where originality is essential. The often reported hallucinations within Generative AI in general, and also relevant for ChatGPT, can render its use of limited benefit where accuracy is essential. What ChatGPT lacks is a stochastic measure to help provide sincere and sensitive communication with its users. Academic regulations and evaluation practices used in educational institutions need to be updated, should ChatGPT be used as a tool in education. To address the transformative effects of ChatGPT on the learning environment, educating teachers and students alike about its capabilities and limitations will be crucial.

Manmeet Singh, Bipin Kumar, Rajib Chattopadhyay et al.

This survey focuses on the current problems in Earth systems science where machine learning algorithms can be applied. It provides an overview of previous work, ongoing work at the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Gov. of India, and future applications of ML algorithms to some significant earth science problems. We provide a comparison of previous work with this survey, a mind map of multidimensional areas related to machine learning and a Gartner's hype cycle for machine learning in Earth system science (ESS). We mainly focus on the critical components in Earth Sciences, including atmospheric, Ocean, Seismology, and biosphere, and cover AI/ML applications to statistical downscaling and forecasting problems.

Manmeet Singh, Chirag Dhara, Adarsh Kumar et al.

Climate change has become one of the biggest global problems increasingly compromising the Earth's habitability. Recent developments such as the extraordinary heat waves in California & Canada, and the devastating floods in Germany point to the role of climate change in the ever-increasing frequency of extreme weather. Numerical modelling of the weather and climate have seen tremendous improvements in the last five decades, yet stringent limitations remain to be overcome. Spatially and temporally localized forecasting is the need of the hour for effective adaptation measures towards minimizing the loss of life and property. Artificial Intelligence-based methods are demonstrating promising results in improving predictions, but are still limited by the availability of requisite hardware and software required to process the vast deluge of data at a scale of the planet Earth. Quantum computing is an emerging paradigm that has found potential applicability in several fields. In this opinion piece, we argue that new developments in Artificial Intelligence algorithms designed for quantum computers - also known as Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) - may provide the key breakthroughs necessary to furthering the science of climate change. The resultant improvements in weather and climate forecasts are expected to cascade to numerous societal benefits.

Manmeet Singh, Bipin Kumar, Suryachandra Rao et al.

The formation of precipitation in state-of-the-art weather and climate models is an important process. The understanding of its relationship with other variables can lead to endless benefits, particularly for the world's monsoon regions dependent on rainfall as a support for livelihood. Various factors play a crucial role in the formation of rainfall, and those physical processes are leading to significant biases in the operational weather forecasts. We use the UNET architecture of a deep convolutional neural network with residual learning as a proof of concept to learn global data-driven models of precipitation. The models are trained on reanalysis datasets projected on the cubed-sphere projection to minimize errors due to spherical distortion. The results are compared with the operational dynamical model used by the India Meteorological Department. The theoretical deep learning-based model shows doubling of the grid point, as well as area averaged skill measured in Pearson correlation coefficients relative to operational system. This study is a proof-of-concept showing that residual learning-based UNET can unravel physical relationships to target precipitation, and those physical constraints can be used in the dynamical operational models towards improved precipitation forecasts. Our results pave the way for the development of online, hybrid models in the future.

Bipin Kumar, Rajib Chattopadhyay, Manmeet Singh et al.

Downscaling is necessary to generate high-resolution observation data to validate the climate model forecast or monitor rainfall at the micro-regional level operationally. Dynamical and statistical downscaling models are often used to get information at high-resolution gridded data over larger domains. As rainfall variability is dependent on the complex Spatio-temporal process leading to non-linear or chaotic Spatio-temporal variations, no single downscaling method can be considered efficient enough. In data with complex topographies, quasi-periodicities, and non-linearities, deep Learning (DL) based methods provide an efficient solution in downscaling rainfall data for regional climate forecasting and real-time rainfall observation data at high spatial resolutions. In this work, we employed three deep learning-based algorithms derived from the super-resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) methods, to precipitation data, in particular, IMD and TRMM data to produce 4x-times high-resolution downscaled rainfall data during the summer monsoon season. Among the three algorithms, namely SRCNN, stacked SRCNN, and DeepSD, employed here, the best spatial distribution of rainfall amplitude and minimum root-mean-square error is produced by DeepSD based downscaling. Hence, the use of the DeepSD algorithm is advocated for future use. We found that spatial discontinuity in amplitude and intensity rainfall patterns is the main obstacle in the downscaling of precipitation. Furthermore, we applied these methods for model data postprocessing, in particular, ERA5 data. Downscaled ERA5 rainfall data show a much better distribution of spatial covariance and temporal variance when compared with observation.