2,142 research outputs found
“Dust in the wind...”, deep learning application to wind energy time series forecasting
To balance electricity production and demand, it is required to use different prediction techniques extensively. Renewable energy, due to its intermittency, increases the complexity and uncertainty of forecasting, and the resulting accuracy impacts all the different players acting around the electricity systems around the world like generators, distributors, retailers, or consumers. Wind forecasting can be done under two major approaches, using meteorological numerical prediction models or based on pure time series input. Deep learning is appearing as a new method that can be used for wind energy prediction. This work develops several deep learning architectures and shows their performance when applied to wind time series. The models have been tested with the most extensive wind dataset available, the National Renewable Laboratory Wind Toolkit, a dataset with 126,692 wind points in North America. The architectures designed are based on different approaches, Multi-Layer Perceptron Networks (MLP), Convolutional Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Networks (RNN). These deep learning architectures have been tested to obtain predictions in a 12-h ahead horizon, and the accuracy is measured with the coefficient of determination, the R² method. The application of the models to wind sites evenly distributed in the North America geography allows us to infer several conclusions on the relationships between methods, terrain, and forecasting complexity. The results show differences between the models and confirm the superior capabilities on the use of deep learning techniques for wind speed forecasting from wind time series data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Statistical Parameter Selection for Clustering Persistence Diagrams
International audienceIn urgent decision making applications, ensemble simulations are an important way to determine different outcome scenarios based on currently available data. In this paper, we will analyze the output of ensemble simulations by considering so-called persistence diagrams, which are reduced representations of the original data, motivated by the extraction of topological features. Based on a recently published progressive algorithm for the clustering of persistence diagrams, we determine the optimal number of clusters, and therefore the number of significantly different outcome scenarios, by the minimization of established statistical score functions. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of the statistical selection of the number of clusters and provide the results of an experimental study, where this implementation has been applied to real-world ensemble data sets
Pacific Ocean Forcing and Atmospheric Variability are the Dominant Causes of Spatially Widespread Droughts in the Contiguous United States
The contributions of oceanic and atmospheric variability to spatially widespread summer droughts in the contiguous United States (hereafter, pan-CONUS droughts) are investigated using 16-member ensembles of the Community Climate Model version 3 (CCM3) forced with observed sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from 1856 to 2012. The employed SST forcing fields are either (i) global or restricted to the (ii) tropical Pacific or (iii) tropical Atlantic to isolate the impacts of these two ocean regions on pan-CONUS droughts. Model results show that SST forcing of pan-CONUS droughts originates almost entirely from the tropical Pacific because of atmospheric highs from the northern Pacific to eastern North America established by La Nia conditions, with little contribution from the tropical Atlantic. Notably, in all three model configurations, internal atmospheric variability influences pan-CONUS drought occurrence by as much or more than the ocean forcing and can alone cause pan-CONUS droughts by establishing a dominant high centered over the US montane West. Similar results are found for the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5). Model results are compared to the observational record, which supports model-inferred contributions to pan-CONUS droughts from La Nias and internal atmospheric variability. While there may be an additional association with warm Atlantic SSTs in the observational record, this association is ambiguous due to the limited number of observed pan-CONUS. The ambiguity thus opens the possibility that the observational results are limited by sampling over the 20th-century and not at odds with the suggested dominance of Pacific Ocean forcing in the model ensembles
Progressive Wasserstein Barycenters of Persistence Diagrams
This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the progressive approximation
of Wasserstein barycenters of persistence diagrams, with applications to the
visual analysis of ensemble data. Given a set of scalar fields, our approach
enables the computation of a persistence diagram which is representative of the
set, and which visually conveys the number, data ranges and saliences of the
main features of interest found in the set. Such representative diagrams are
obtained by computing explicitly the discrete Wasserstein barycenter of the set
of persistence diagrams, a notoriously computationally intensive task. In
particular, we revisit efficient algorithms for Wasserstein distance
approximation [12,51] to extend previous work on barycenter estimation [94]. We
present a new fast algorithm, which progressively approximates the barycenter
by iteratively increasing the computation accuracy as well as the number of
persistent features in the output diagram. Such a progressivity drastically
improves convergence in practice and allows to design an interruptible
algorithm, capable of respecting computation time constraints. This enables the
approximation of Wasserstein barycenters within interactive times. We present
an application to ensemble clustering where we revisit the k-means algorithm to
exploit our barycenters and compute, within execution time constraints,
meaningful clusters of ensemble data along with their barycenter diagram.
Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-life data sets report that our
algorithm converges to barycenters that are qualitatively meaningful with
regard to the applications, and quantitatively comparable to previous
techniques, while offering an order of magnitude speedup when run until
convergence (without time constraint). Our algorithm can be trivially
parallelized to provide additional speedups in practice on standard
workstations. [...
Principal Geodesic Analysis of Merge Trees (and Persistence Diagrams)
This paper presents a computational framework for the Principal Geodesic
Analysis of merge trees (MT-PGA), a novel adaptation of the celebrated
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) framework [87] to the Wasserstein metric
space of merge trees [92]. We formulate MT-PGA computation as a constrained
optimization problem, aiming at adjusting a basis of orthogonal geodesic axes,
while minimizing a fitting energy. We introduce an efficient, iterative
algorithm which exploits shared-memory parallelism, as well as an analytic
expression of the fitting energy gradient, to ensure fast iterations. Our
approach also trivially extends to extremum persistence diagrams. Extensive
experiments on public ensembles demonstrate the efficiency of our approach -
with MT-PGA computations in the orders of minutes for the largest examples. We
show the utility of our contributions by extending to merge trees two typical
PCA applications. First, we apply MT-PGA to data reduction and reliably
compress merge trees by concisely representing them by their first coordinates
in the MT-PGA basis. Second, we present a dimensionality reduction framework
exploiting the first two directions of the MT-PGA basis to generate
two-dimensional layouts of the ensemble. We augment these layouts with
persistence correlation views, enabling global and local visual inspections of
the feature variability in the ensemble. In both applications, quantitative
experiments assess the relevance of our framework. Finally, we provide a
lightweight C++ implementation that can be used to reproduce our results
Workshop on Drought Forecasting for Northeast Brazil
Precipitation forecasting parameters for northeast Brazil were developed. Hydrological, sociological, and economic aspects were examined. A drought forecasting model is presented
Report from solar physics
A discussion of the nature of solar physics is followed by a brief review of recent advances in the field. These advances include: the first direct experimental confirmation of the central role played by thermonuclear processes in stars; the discovery that the 5-minute oscillations of the Sun are a global seismic phenomenon that can be used as a probe of the structure and dynamical behavior of the solar interior; the discovery that the solar magnetic field is subdivided into individual flux tubes with field strength exceeding 1000 gauss. Also covered was a science strategy for pure solar physics. Brief discussions are given of solar-terrestrial physics, solar/stellar relationships, and suggested space missions
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