This problem is known to be complicated by many unobserved confounders.

This problem is known to be complicated by many unobserved confounders.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) relies heavily on seawater desalination to meet over 90% of its drinking water needs. Desalination processes are highly energy intensive and account for approximately 15% of the UAE's electricity consumption, contributing to over 22% of the country's energy-related CO2 emissions. Moreover, these processes face significant sustainability challenges in the face of climate uncertainties such as rising seawater temperatures, salinity, and aerosol optical depth (AOD). AOD greatly affects the operational and economic performance of solar-powered desalination systems through photovoltaic soiling, membrane fouling, and water turbidity cycles. This study proposes a novel pipelined two-stage predictive modelling architecture: the first stage forecasts AOD using satellite-derived time series and meteorological data; the second stage uses the predicted AOD and other meteorological factors to predict desalination performance efficiency losses. The framework achieved 98% accuracy, and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used to reveal key drivers of system degradation. Furthermore, this study proposes a dust-aware rule-based control logic for desalination systems based on predicted values of AOD and solar efficiency. This control logic is used to adjust the desalination plant feed water pressure, adapt maintenance scheduling, and regulate energy source switching. To enhance the practical utility of the research findings, the predictive models and rule-based controls were packaged into an interactive dashboard for scenario and predictive analytics. This provides a management decision-support system for climate-adaptive planning.

Stratospheric aerosols play an important role in the earth system and can affect the climate on timescales of months to years. However, estimating the characteristics of partially observed aerosol injections, such as those from volcanic eruptions, is fraught with uncertainties. This article presents a framework for stratospheric aerosol source inversion which accounts for background aerosol noise and earth system internal variability via a Bayesian approximation error approach. We leverage specially designed earth system model simulations using the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). A comprehensive framework for data generation, data processing, dimension reduction, operator learning, and Bayesian inversion is presented where each component of the framework is designed to address particular challenges in stratospheric modeling on the global scale. We present numerical results using synthesized observational data to rigorously assess the ability of our approach to estimate aerosol sources and associate uncertainty with those estimates.

A Viral Infection Risk Indoor Simulator (VIRIS) has been developed to quickly assess and compare mitigations for airborne disease spread. This agent-based simulator combines people movement in an indoor space, viral transmission modelling and detailed architectural design, and it is powered by topologicpy, an open-source Python library. VIRIS generates very fast predictions of the viral concentration and the spatiotemporal infection risk for individuals as they move through a given space. The simulator is validated with data from a courtroom superspreader event. A sensitivity study for unknown parameter values is also performed. We compare several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) issued in UK government guidance, for two indoor settings: a care home and a supermarket. Additionally, we have developed the user-friendly VIRIS web app that allows quick exploration of diverse scenarios of interest and visualisation, allowing policymakers, architects and space managers to easily design or assess infection risk in an indoor space.

We study viral transmission in crowds via the short-ranged airborne pathway using a purely model-based approach. Our goal is two-pronged. Firstly, we illustrate with a concrete and pedagogical case study how to estimate the risks of new viral infections by coupling pedestrian simulations with the transmission algorithm that we recently released as open-source code. The algorithm hinges on pre-computed viral concentration maps derived from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Secondly, we investigate to what extent the transmission risk predictions depend on the pedestrian dynamics model in use. For the simple bidirectional flow under consideration, the predictions are found to be surprisingly stable across initial conditions and models, despite the different microscopic arrangements of the simulated crowd, as long as the crowd evolves in a qualitatively similarly way. On the other hand, when major changes are observed in the crowd's behaviour, notably whenever a jam occurs at the centre of the channel, the estimated risks surge drastically.

Fingerprints are key tools in climate change detection and attribution (D&A) that are used to determine whether changes in observations are different from internal climate variability (detection), and whether observed changes can be assigned to specific external drivers (attribution). We propose a direct D&A approach based on supervised learning to extract fingerprints that lead to robust predictions under relevant interventions on exogenous variables, i.e., climate drivers other than the target. We employ anchor regression, a distributionally-robust statistical learning method inspired by causal inference that extrapolates well to perturbed data under the interventions considered. The residuals from the prediction achieve either uncorrelatedness or mean independence with the exogenous variables, thus guaranteeing robustness. We define D&A as a unified hypothesis testing framework that relies on the same statistical model but uses different targets and test statistics. In the experiments, we first show that the CO2 forcing can be robustly predicted from temperature spatial patterns under strong interventions on the solar forcing. Second, we illustrate attribution to the greenhouse gases and aerosols while protecting against interventions on the aerosols and CO2 forcing, respectively. Our study shows that incorporating robustness constraints against relevant interventions may significantly benefit detection and attribution of climate change.

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) include various effects that result from aerosols entering a cloud, and affecting cloud properties. In general, an increase in aerosol concentration results in smaller droplet sizes which leads to larger, brighter, longer-lasting clouds that reflect more sunlight and cool the Earth. The strength of the effect is however heterogeneous, meaning it depends on the surrounding environment, making ACI one of the most uncertain effects in our current climate models. In our work, we use causal machine learning to estimate ACI from satellite observations by reframing the problem as a treatment (aerosol) and outcome (change in droplet radius). We predict the causal effect of aerosol on clouds with uncertainty bounds depending on the unknown factors that may be influencing the impact of aerosol. Of the three climate models evaluated, we find that only one plausibly recreates the trend, lending more credence to its estimate cooling due to ACI.

Estimating the effects of continuous-valued interventions from observational data is a critically important task for climate science, healthcare, and economics. Recent work focuses on designing neural network architectures and regularization functions to allow for scalable estimation of average and individual-level dose-response curves from high-dimensional, large-sample data. Such methodologies assume ignorability (observation of all confounding variables) and positivity (observation of all treatment levels for every covariate value describing a set of units), assumptions problematic in the continuous treatment regime. Scalable sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to understand the ignorance induced in causal estimates when these assumptions are relaxed are less studied. Here, we develop a continuous treatment-effect marginal sensitivity model (CMSM) and derive bounds that agree with the observed data and a researcher-defined level of hidden confounding. We introduce a scalable algorithm and uncertainty-aware deep models to derive and estimate these bounds for high-dimensional, large-sample observational data. We work in concert with climate scientists interested in the climatological impacts of human emissions on cloud properties using satellite observations from the past 15 years. This problem is known to be complicated by many unobserved confounders.

Numerical simulations of Earth's weather and climate require substantial amounts of computation. This has led to a growing interest in replacing subroutines that explicitly compute physical processes with approximate machine learning (ML) methods that are fast at inference time. Within weather and climate models, atmospheric radiative transfer (RT) calculations are especially expensive. This has made them a popular target for neural network-based emulators. However, prior work is hard to compare due to the lack of a comprehensive dataset and standardized best practices for ML benchmarking. To fill this gap, we build a large dataset, ClimART, with more than \emph{10 million samples from present, pre-industrial, and future climate conditions}, based on the Canadian Earth System Model. ClimART poses several methodological challenges for the ML community, such as multiple out-of-distribution test sets, underlying domain physics, and a trade-off between accuracy and inference speed. We also present several novel baselines that indicate shortcomings of datasets and network architectures used in prior work. Download instructions, baselines, and code are available at: https://github.com/RolnickLab/climart