Work

Detection and Attribution of Climate Change Using a Neural Network

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: A new detection and attribution method is presented and applied to the global mean surface air temperature (GSAT) from 1900 to 2014. The method aims at attributing the climate changes to the variations of greenhouse gases, anthropogenic aerosols, and natural forcings. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained using the simulated GSAT from historical and single-forcing simulations of twelve climate models. Then, we perform a backward optimization with the CNN to estimate the attributable GSAT changes. Such a method does not assume additivity in the effects of the forcings. The uncertainty in the attributable GSAT is estimated by sampling different starting points from single-forcing simulations and repeating the backward optimization. To evaluate this new method, the attributable GSAT changes are also calculated using the regularized optimal fingerprinting (ROF) method. Using synthetic non-additive data, we first find that the neural network-based method estimates attribuable changes better than ROF. When using GSAT data from climate model, the attribuable anomalies are similar for both methods, which might reflect that the influence of forcing is mainy additive for the GSAT. However, we found that the uncertainties given both methods are different. The new method presented here can be adapted and extended in future work, to investigate the non-additive changes found at the local scale or on other physical variables.

Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

DOI: 10.1029/2022ms003475

Authors: Constantin Bône, Guillaume Gastineau, Sylvie Thiria, Patrick Gallinari, Carlos Mejia