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Predicting El Nino- Southern Oscillation using Deep Learning

Advisors :

Georgy Manucharyan

Scott Martin

PhD Students:

Cassia Cai

Gemma O’Connor

Youngwon Kim

Undergrads :

Anuj Jain

Lisa Li

Sandy Wu

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What we have

What we want

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Gridded SST from large ensemble( CESM 2) of historical climate model simulations (165 yrs)

Machine Learning Tools & Cloud Server

Team Members

Predict El Nino Index of future i.e SST anomaly over Time in NINO 34 region

Comparison of accuracy of various ML methods

Team Work !

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Baseline method for comparing our methods to (assume SST anomaly value remains constant)

Principal Component Analysis - reduce the dimensionality of the data. We used 32 PCAs to cover ~80% of variance

LSTM - learning order dependence in sequence prediction

trained using LSTM which. 20 Epochs

Here, model forgets the insignificant parameters while training.

Creates a Filter Matrix and examines what the best activation functions (ReLU) and optimizers (adamax) are. Variables in Matrix stores information as data is being read (gets trained for 5 layers ). The filter created is used to predict.

Besides using filter layers as in CNN, the network also stores information from dataset of previous run. Consequently, most efficient here. Needs more time and space to train (10 Epochs)

Convolutional Neural

Network 2D

Convolutional LSTM

PCA - LSTM

Machine Learning

Methods Description

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Results

NINO 3.4 Index,

Tropical Pacific Ocean - SST

Latitude - 5°S to 5°N�Longitude - 190°E to 240°E

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Each ML method performs better than naive Persistent Method

Convolutional LSTM Method has very good predictive power for El-Nino 4 Months in advance

CNN Method for 3 Months in advance and flattens for longer prediction with average accuracy

300 Random points are chosen and SST anomaly prediction is made using various methods

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Potential Improvements- For us, you & OHW 23

Involve more variables for prediction : SSH, Wind Speed, Pressure, Wave Velocity

Improving performance reliability for distant future

Collaboration !

Long term Impacts

Uncovering the black box of ML- why do the methods perform this way?