Climate and Sustainability
Our Climate change is an incredibly urgent threat to humanity with far-reaching societal and economic consequences. Our research is advancing AI to empower partners and users to take climate mitigation action, and help communities adapt to the effects of climate change while building resilience. As part of our mission to build a safer, more sustainable future for all, we collaborate closely with cities, governments, startups and aid organizations.
Recent Publications
In Defense of Metrics: Metrics Sufficiently Encode Typical Human Preferences Regarding Hydrological Model Performance
Martin Gauch
Frederik Kratzert
Hoshin Gupta
Juliane Mai
Bryan A. Tolson
Sepp Hochreiter
Daniel Klotz
Water Resources Research, 59, e2022WR033918 (2023)
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Building accurate rainfall–runoff models is an integral part of hydrological science and practice. The variety of modeling goals and applications have led to a large suite of evaluation metrics for these models. Yet, hydrologists still put considerable trust into visual judgment, although it is unclear whether such judgment agrees or disagrees with existing quantitative metrics. In this study, we tasked 622 experts to compare and judge more than 14,000 pairs of hydrographs from 13 different models. Our results show that expert opinion broadly agrees with quantitative metrics and results in a clear preference for a Machine Learning model over traditional hydrological models. The expert opinions are, however, subject to significant amounts of inconsistency. Nevertheless, where experts agree, we can predict their opinion purely from quantitative metrics, which indicates that the metrics sufficiently encode human preferences in a small set of numbers. While there remains room for improvement of quantitative metrics, we suggest that the hydrologic community should reinforce their benchmarking efforts and put more trust in these metrics.
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AI Increases Global Access to Reliable Flood Forecasts
Asher Metzger
Dana Weitzner
Frederik Kratzert
Guy Shalev
Martin Gauch
Sella Nevo
Shlomo Shenzis
Tadele Yednkachw Tekalign
Vusumuzi Dube
arXiv (2023)
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Floods are one of the most common natural disasters, with a disproportionate impact in developing countries that often lack dense streamflow gauge networks. Accurate and timely warnings are critical for mitigating flood risks, but hydrological simulation models typically must be calibrated to long data records in each watershed. Here we show that AI-based forecasting achieves reliability in predicting extreme riverine events in ungauged watersheds at up to a 5-day lead time that is similar to or better than the reliability of nowcasts (0-day lead time) from a current state of the art global modeling system (the Copernicus Emergency Management Service Global Flood Awareness System). Additionally, we achieve accuracies over 5-year return period events that are similar to or better than current accuracies over 1-year return period events. This means that AI can provide flood warnings earlier and over larger and more impactful events in ungauged basins. The model developed in this paper was incorporated into an operational early warning system that produces publicly available (free and open) forecasts in real time in over 80 countries. This work highlights a need for increasing the availability of hydrological data to continue to improve global access to reliable flood warnings.
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We develop a deep learning based convolutional-regression model that estimates the volumetric soil moisture content in the top ~5 cm. Input predictors include Sentinel-1 (active radar), Sentinel-2 (optical imagery), and SMAP (passive radar) as well as geophysical variables from SoilGrids and modelled soil moisture fields from GLDAS. The model was trained and evaluated on data from ~1300 in-situ sensors globally over the period 2015 - 2021 and obtained an average per-sensor correlation of 0.72 and ubRMSE of 0.0546. These results are benchmarked against 13 other soil moisture estimates at different locations, and an ablation study was used to identify important predictors.
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Caravan - A global community dataset for large-sample hydrology
Frederik Kratzert
Nans Addor
Tyler Erickson
Martin Gauch
Lukas Gudmundsson
Daniel Klotz
Sella Nevo
Guy Shalev
Scientific Data, 10 (2023), pp. 61
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High-quality datasets are essential to support hydrological science and modeling. Several CAMELS (Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies) datasets exist for specific countries or regions, however these datasets lack standardization, which makes global studies difficult. This paper introduces a dataset called Caravan (a series of CAMELS) that standardizes and aggregates seven existing large-sample hydrology datasets. Caravan includes meteorological forcing data, streamflow data, and static catchment attributes (e.g., geophysical, sociological, climatological) for 6830 catchments. Most importantly, Caravan is both a dataset and open-source software that allows members of the hydrology community to extend the dataset to new locations by extracting forcing data and catchment attributes in the cloud. Our vision is for Caravan to democratize the creation and use of globally-standardized large-sample hydrology datasets. Caravan is a truly global open-source community resource.
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A Neural Encoder for Earthquake Rate Forecasting
Oleg Zlydenko
Brendan Meade
Alexandra Sharon Molchanov
Sella Nevo
Yohai bar Sinai
Scientific Reports (2023)
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Forecasting the timing of earthquakes is a long-standing challenge. Moreover, it is still debated how to formulate this problem in a useful manner, or to compare the predictive power of different models.
Here, we develop a versatile neural encoder of earthquake catalogs, and apply it to the fundamental problem of earthquake rate prediction, in the spatio-temporal point process framework. The epidemic
type aftershock sequence model (ETAS) effectively learns a small number of parameters to constrain assumed functional forms for the space and time relationships of earthquake sequences (e.g., Omori-Utsu law). Here we introduce learned spatial and temporal embeddings for point process earthquake forecast models that capture complex correlation structures. We demonstrate the generality of this neural representation as compared with ETAS model using train-test data splits and how it enables the incorporation of additional geophysical information. In rate prediction tasks, the generalized model shows > 4% improvement in information gain per earthquake and the simultaneous learning of anisotropic spatial structures analogous to fault traces. The trained network can be also used to perform short-term prediction tasks, showing similar improvement while providing a 1,000-fold reduction in run-time.
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NeuralHydrology --- A Python library for Deep Learning research in hydrology
Frederik Kratzert
Martin Gauch
Daniel Klotz
Journal of Open Source Software, 7(71) (2022), pp. 4050
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Summary:
This manuscript is intended to be submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software for the Python library NeuralHydrology https://github.com/neuralhydrology/neuralhydrology
I created this library during my PhD at the JKU in Linz and it was open sourced in 2019 and is currently maintained by myself, two former colleagues from the JKU and Grey Nearing (@gsnearing).
The purpose of this library is to make machine learning more accessible to hydrologists, who have usually a) little training in programming and b) no machine learning classes/experience. The NeuralHydrology library is designed to make state of the art models for e.g. rainfall-runoff modeling easily accessible (training and evaluation can be configured from a YAML config file, no coding required) but also easily extendable (e.g. new datasets, models, loss functions etc.) for a more research oriented use case. The library is fully documented and has a number of tutorials.
We used this library in the past years for all of our publications and research. Since its publication, it is also being used by several other groups in their day-to-day research and in their journal publications.
The JOSS publication is meant to make this library more easy to reference (as requested by users of this library). JOSS publications are usually a 1-2 page description and during the review period the focus is more on the code/documentation etc. itself than on the written paper.
Note on the document: JOSS paper's are submitted as Markdown + Bibtex and then rendered into a PDF. I can't render the Markdown offline and since I should not submit the document somewhere online before approval, I can only share the Markdown file.
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