Parametric Sensitivities of a Wind-driven Baroclinic Ocean Using Neural Surrogates

Numerical models of the ocean and ice sheets are crucial for understanding and simulating the impact of greenhouse gases on the global climate. Oceanic processes affect phenomena such as hurricanes, extreme precipitation, and droughts. Ocean models rely on subgrid-scale parameterizations that require calibration and often significantly affect model skill. When model sensitivities to parameters can be computed by using approaches such as automatic differentiation, they can be used for such calibration toward reducing the misfit between model output and data. Because the SOMA model code is challenging to differentiate, we have created neural network-based surrogates for estimating the sensitivity of the ocean model to model parameters. We first generated perturbed parameter ensemble data for an idealized ocean model and trained three surrogate neural network models. The neural surrogates accurately predicted the one-step forward ocean dynamics, of which we then computed the parametric sensitivity.