Identifying Spatio-Temporal Drivers of Extreme Events

The spatio-temporal relations of impacts of extreme events and their drivers in climate data are not fully understood and there is a need of machine learning approaches to identify such spatio-temporal relations from data. The task, however, is very challenging since there are time delays between extremes and their drivers, and the spatial response of such drivers is inhomogeneous. In this work, we propose a first approach and benchmarks to tackle this challenge. Our approach is trained end-to-end to predict spatio-temporally extremes and spatio-temporally drivers in the physical input variables jointly. By enforcing the network to predict extremes from spatio-temporal binary masks of identified drivers, the network successfully identifies drivers that are correlated with extremes. We evaluate our approach on three newly created synthetic benchmarks, where two of them are based on remote sensing or reanalysis climate data, and on two real-world reanalysis datasets. The source code and datasets are publicly available at the project page https://hakamshams.github.io/IDE.

Location-aware Adaptive Denormalization: A Deep Learning Approach For Wildfire Danger Forecasting

Climate change is expected to intensify and increase extreme events in the weather cycle. Since this has a significant impact on various sectors of our life, recent works are concerned with identifying and predicting such extreme events from Earth observations. This paper proposes a 2D/3D two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) for wildfire danger forecasting. To use a unified framework, previous approaches duplicate static variables along the time dimension and neglect the intrinsic differences between static and dynamic variables. Furthermore, most existing multi-branch architectures lose the interconnections between the branches during the feature learning stage. To address these issues, we propose a two-branch architecture with a Location-aware Adaptive Denormalization layer (LOADE). Using LOADE as a building block, we can modulate the dynamic features conditional on their geographical location. Thus, our approach considers feature properties as a unified yet compound 2D/3D model. Besides, we propose using an absolute temporal encoding for time-related forecasting problems. Our experimental results show a better performance of our approach than other baselines on the challenging FireCube dataset.