Balu Nadiga

Yixuan Sun, Elizabeth Cucuzzella, Steven Brus et al.

Modeling is crucial to understanding the effect of greenhouse gases, warming, and ice sheet melting on the ocean. At the same time, ocean processes affect phenomena such as hurricanes and droughts. Parameters in the models that cannot be physically measured have a significant effect on the model output. For an idealized ocean model, we generated perturbed parameter ensemble data and trained surrogate neural network models. The neural surrogates accurately predicted the one-step forward dynamics, of which we then computed the parametric sensitivity.

Wei Xu, Derek Freeman DeSantis, Xihaier Luo et al.

Learning a continuous and reliable representation of physical fields from sparse sampling is challenging and it affects diverse scientific disciplines. In a recent work, we present a novel model called MMGN (Multiplicative and Modulated Gabor Network) with implicit neural networks. In this work, we design additional studies leveraging explainability methods to complement the previous experiments and further enhance the understanding of latent representations generated by the model. The adopted methods are general enough to be leveraged for any latent space inspection. Preliminary results demonstrate the contextual information incorporated in the latent representations and their impact on the model performance. As a work in progress, we will continue to verify our findings and develop novel explainability approaches.

Daniel Messenger, Daniel Serino, Balu Nadiga et al.

Efficient modeling of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) is essential to many engineering tasks, including high-speed combustion and drive and capsule geometry optimization in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). In the latter, RMI causes the ablator and fuel to mix, introducing cold spots into the fuel and lowering performance; controlling RMI is thus a core ICF design concern. In this work, we introduce a reduced-order model for two-dimensional RMI based on the Latent Space Dynamics Identification (LaSDI) algorithm. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology in efficiently parametrizing the solution space over a high-dimensional parameter vector consisting of material EOS parameters and initial conditions known to affect RMI growth rates. Using only late-time partial observations of the dynamics, we use our framework to not only provide a highly efficient dynamic surrogate model, but to reveal that the RMI exhibits the structure of a surprisingly low-dimensional and linear dynamical system, into the nonlinear growth regime, after a suitable nonlinear transformation is applied to the material interface, which we approximate as a trained autoencoder. Our use of practical observables and fundamental parameters suggests that such ROMs may be useful for downstream engineering tasks which confront the RMI, while the low-dimensional representation suggests a new direction for theoretical work.

Yixuan Sun, Romain Egele, Sri Hari Krishna Narayanan et al.

Accurate simulations of the oceans are crucial in understanding the Earth system. Despite their efficiency, simulations at lower resolutions must rely on various uncertain parameterizations to account for unresolved processes. However, model sensitivity to parameterizations is difficult to quantify, making it challenging to tune these parameterizations to reproduce observations. Deep learning surrogates have shown promise for efficient computation of the parametric sensitivities in the form of partial derivatives, but their reliability is difficult to evaluate without ground truth derivatives. In this work, we leverage large-scale hyperparameter search and ensemble learning to improve both forward predictions, autoregressive rollout, and backward adjoint sensitivity estimation. Particularly, the ensemble method provides epistemic uncertainty of function value predictions and their derivatives, providing improved reliability of the neural surrogates in decision making.

Guang Zhao, Xihaier Luo, Seungjun Lee et al.

Mesoscale ocean dynamics play a critical role in climate systems, governing heat transport, hurricane genesis, and drought patterns. However, simulating these processes at high resolution remains computationally prohibitive due to their nonlinear, multiscale nature and vast spatiotemporal domains. Implicit neural representations (INRs) reduce the computational costs as resolution-independent surrogates but fail in many-query scenarios (inverse modeling) requiring rapid evaluations across diverse parameters. We present PINROD, a novel framework combining dynamics-aware implicit neural representations with parameterized neural ordinary differential equations to address these limitations. By integrating parametric dependencies into latent dynamics, our method efficiently captures nonlinear oceanic behavior across varying boundary conditions and physical parameters. Experiments on ocean mesoscale activity data show superior accuracy over existing baselines and improved computational efficiency compared to standard numerical simulations.

Xihaier Luo, Wei Xu, Yihui Ren et al.

Reliably reconstructing physical fields from sparse sensor data is a challenge that frequently arises in many scientific domains. In practice, the process generating the data often is not understood to sufficient accuracy. Therefore, there is a growing interest in using the deep neural network route to address the problem. This work presents a novel approach that learns a continuous representation of the physical field using implicit neural representations (INRs). Specifically, after factorizing spatiotemporal variability into spatial and temporal components using the separation of variables technique, the method learns relevant basis functions from sparsely sampled irregular data points to develop a continuous representation of the data. In experimental evaluations, the proposed model outperforms recent INR methods, offering superior reconstruction quality on simulation data from a state-of-the-art climate model and a second dataset that comprises ultra-high resolution satellite-based sea surface temperature fields.

W. R. Casper, Balu Nadiga

We present a new clustering algorithm that is based on searching for natural gaps in the components of the lowest energy eigenvectors of the Laplacian of a graph. In comparing the performance of the proposed method with a set of other popular methods (KMEANS, spectral-KMEANS, and an agglomerative method) in the context of the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi (LFR) Benchmark for undirected weighted overlapping networks, we find that the new method outperforms the other spectral methods considered in certain parameter regimes. Finally, in an application to climate data involving one of the most important modes of interannual climate variability, the El Nino Southern Oscillation phenomenon, we demonstrate the ability of the new algorithm to readily identify different flavors of the phenomenon.