Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Meteorology and Climate Science: Model Fine-Tuning, Calibrating Trust and Learning New Science

Abstract

In recent years, artificial intelligence and specifically artificial neural networks (NNs) have shown great success in solving complex, nonlinear problems in earth sciences. Despite their success, the strategies upon which NNs make decisions are hard to decipher, which prevents scientists from interpreting and building trust in the NN predictions; a highly desired and necessary condition for the further use and exploitation of NNs’ potential. Thus, a variety of methods have been recently introduced with the aim of attributing the NN predictions to specific features in the input space and explaining their strategy. The so-called eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is already seeing great application in a plethora of fields, offering promising results and insights about the decision strategies of NNs. Here, we provide an overview of the most recent work from our group, applying XAI to meteorology and climate science. Specifically, we present results from satellite applications that include weather phenomena identification and image to image translation, applications to climate prediction at subseasonal to decadal timescales, and detection of forced climatic changes and anthropogenic footprint. We also summarize a recently introduced synthetic benchmark dataset that can be used to improve our understanding of different XAI methods and introduce objectivity into the assessment of their fidelity. With this overview, we aim to illustrate how gaining accurate insights about the NN decision strategy can help climate scientists and meteorologists improve practices in fine-tuning model architectures, calibrating trust in climate and weather prediction and attribution, and learning new science.