arXiv subjects

Kevin Bowman

Publications and source records attributed to Kevin Bowman.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Uncertainty Quantification for Surface Ozone Emulators using Deep Learning

Air pollution is a global hazard, and as of 2023, 94\% of the world's population is exposed to unsafe pollution levels. Surface Ozone (O3), an important pollutant, and the drivers of its trends are difficult to model, and traditional physics-based models fall short in their practical use for scales relevant to human-health impacts. Deep Learning-based emulators have shown promise in capturing complex climate patterns, but overall lack the interpretability necessary to support critical decision making for policy changes and public health measures. We implement an uncertainty-aware U-Net architecture to predict the Multi-mOdel Multi-cOnstituent Chemical data assimilation (MOMO-Chem) model's surface ozone residuals (bias) using Bayesian and quantile regression methods. We demonstrate the capability of our techniques in regional estimation of bias in North America and Europe for June 2019. We highlight the uncertainty quantification (UQ) scores between our two UQ methodologies and discern which ground stations are optimal and sub-optimal candidates for MOMO-Chem bias correction, and evaluate the impact of land-use information in surface ozone residual modeling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging Deep Learning for Physical Model Bias of Global Air Quality Estimates

Air pollution is the world's largest environmental risk factor for human disease and premature death, resulting in more than 6 million permature deaths in 2019. Currently, there is still a challenge to model one of the most important air pollutants, surface ozone, particularly at scales relevant for human health impacts, with the drivers of global ozone trends at these scales largely unknown, limiting the practical use of physics-based models. We employ a 2D Convolutional Neural Network based architecture that estimate surface ozone MOMO-Chem model residuals, referred to as model bias. We demonstrate the potential of this technique in North America and Europe, highlighting its ability better to capture physical model residuals compared to a traditional machine learning method. We assess the impact of incorporating land use information from high-resolution satellite imagery to improve model estimates. Importantly, we discuss how our results can improve our scientific understanding of the factors impacting ozone bias at urban scales that can be used to improve environmental policy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Differentiable Land Model Reveals Global Environmental Controls on Ecological Parameters

Do ecosystems primarily reflect evolutionary history or current environment? Predicting land-atmosphere exchange hinges on this unresolved question. Plant traits adapt to particular environments over evolutionary timescales, yet their individual relationships with current climate and soils are often obscured by limited sampling, plant-type effects, and multiple adaptive strategies that can yield similar outcomes. Crucially, it is the coordination of traits, rather than any single trait, that governs vegetation dynamics and ecosystem fluxes, yet such multivariate relationships cannot be directly observed. We present DifferLand, a differentiable hybrid model that integrates process understanding with machine learning to uncover latent trait-environment relationships from global satellite and in-situ observations (2001-2023). DifferLand explains up to 88% of the variance in canopy structure, photosynthesis, and carbon exchange by learning latent ecological axes-leaf economics, plant stature, and cropland distribution-that link long-term adaptation with short-term dynamics. Interpretable machine learning shows that these coordinated axes emerge from nonlinear interactions between plant-type attributes and local environment. Embedding such relationships into terrestrial models establishes a pathway toward adaptive models that better predict ecosystem resilience under climate change.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2020

Impacts of COVID-19 control measures on tropospheric NO$_2$ over China, South Korea and Italy

Tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO$_2$) concentrations are strongly affected by anthropogenic activities. Using space-based measurements of tropospheric NO$_2$, here we investigate the responses of tropospheric NO$_2$ to the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) over China, South Korea, and Italy. We find noticeable reductions of tropospheric NO$_2$ columns due to the COVID-19 controls by more than 40% over E. China, South Korea, and N. Italy. The 40% reductions of tropospheric NO$_2$ are coincident with intensive lockdown events as well as up to 20% reductions in anthropogenic nitrogen oxides (NO$_x$) emissions. The perturbations in tropospheric NO$_2$ diminished accompanied with the mitigation of COVID-19 pandemic, and finally disappeared within around 50-70 days after the starts of control measures over all three nations, providing indications for the start, maximum, and mitigation of intensive controls. This work exhibits significant influences of lockdown measures on atmospheric environment, highlighting the importance of satellite observations to monitor anthropogenic activity changes.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2018

A hierarchical statistical framework for emergent constraints: application to snow-albedo feedback

Emergent constraints use relationships between future and current climate states to constrain projections of climate response. Here, we introduce a statistical, hierarchical emergent constraint (HEC) framework in order to link future and current climate with observations. Under Gaussian assumptions, the mean and variance of the future state is shown analytically to be a function of the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio between data-model error and current-climate uncertainty, and the correlation between future and current climate states. We apply the HEC to the climate-change, snow-albedo feedback, which is related to the seasonal cycle in the Northern Hemisphere. We obtain a snow-albedo-feedback prediction interval of $(-1.25, -0.58)$ \%$K^{-1}$. The critical dependence on SNR and correlation shows that neglecting these terms can lead to bias and under-estimated uncertainty in constrained projections. The flexibility of using HEC under general assumptions throughout the Earth System is discussed.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2016

Observing the carbon-climate system

Increases in atmospheric CO2 and CH4 result from a combination of forcing from anthropogenic emissions and Earth System feedbacks that reduce or amplify the effects of those emissions on atmospheric concentrations. Despite decades of research carbon-climate feedbacks remain poorly quantified. The impact of these uncertainties on future climate are of increasing concern, especially in the wake of recent climate negotiations. Emissions, long concentrated in the developed world, are now shifting to developing countries, where the emissions inventories have larger uncertainties. The fraction of anthropogenic CO2 remaining in the atmosphere has remained remarkably constant over the last 50 years. Will this change in the future as the climate evolves? Concentrations of CH4, the 2nd most important greenhouse gas, which had apparently stabilized, have recently resumed their increase, but the exact cause for this is unknown. While greenhouse gases affect the global atmosphere, their sources and sinks are remarkably heterogeneous in time and space, and traditional in situ observing systems do not provide the coverage and resolution to attribute the changes to these greenhouse gases to specific sources or sinks. In the past few years, space-based technologies have shown promise for monitoring carbon stocks and fluxes. Advanced versions of these capabilities could transform our understanding and provide the data needed to quantify carbon-climate feedbacks. A new observing system that allows resolving global high resolution fluxes will capture variations on time and space scales that allow the attribution of these fluxes to underlying mechanisms.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2007

Two Generator Subalgebras of Lie Algebras

J. G. Thompson showed that a finite group G is solvable if and only if every two -generated subgroup is solvable. Recently, Grunevald, Kunyavskii, Nikolova, and Plotkin have shown that the analogue holds for finite-dimensional Lie algebras over infinite fields of characteristic greater than 5. It is a natural question to ask to what extent the two-generated subalgebras determine the structure of the algebra. It is to this question that this paper is addressed. Here, we consider the classes of strongly-solvable and of supersolvable Lie algebras, and the property of triangulability.

math.RA↗