Development of an Emulator for Radiation Physics Simulator Using Stochastic Variational Gaussian Process Model

Abstract

This paper describes an emulator that uses a Stochastic Variational Gaussian process (SVGP) regression model to parameterize radiation in a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model that meteorologically models the Earth's weather system. The computation of radiative processes is very large, accounting for most of the total NWP model computation. Statistical emulators are surrogate models that represent simulators and can overcome the computational limitations of very complex simulators such as radiative processes. Recently, artificial neural network-based radiative transfer emulators have been developed, and in this study, a statistical model, GP, is used to develop a radiative transfer emulator. The GP model has the advantage of calculating the uncertainty of the prediction along with the prediction, so the uncertainty of the prediction can be utilized appropriately. However, the computational complexity of the conventional GP model is very high, making it difficult to apply to large data. To solve this problem, an approximate approach, the SVGP model, was utilized. To further reduce the dimensionality of the input variables, we used a combined neural network and SVGP model. As a result, the SVGP-based radiative physics emulator improved its accuracy by about 20% compared to the artificial neural network emulator. However, the computation speed was about 3 to 9 times slower than the neural network emulator, but it was faster than the computation speed of the NWP model. This suggests that statistical emulators can be used to replace NWP model simulators.