Using Gaussian process regression and stable isotopologues of water
vapor to estimate shallow convective moistening in the southeastern
Pacific marine stratocumulus region
Abstract
Convective mixing in the lower free troposphere (LFT) and its response
to climate change are at the heart of low-cloud feedbacks in projections
of future warming, but are challenging to diagnose from observations.
The stable isotopic composition of water vapor in the LFT is a sensitive
recorder of shallow convective moistening, and can potentially provide
independent constraints on shallow convective processes. In-situ and
remote sensing measurements from the southeast Pacific marine
stratocumulus region and an isotope-enabled general circulation model
(GCM) are used along with Gaussian process regression (GPR) to explore
the utility of stable isotope measurements and simulations for improved
estimates of shallow convective moistening tendencies in marine
stratocumulus settings. We train the GPR algorithm on conventional and
isotopic fields from a GCM (LMDZ5B) from the SE Pacific marine
stratocumulus region and assess the algorithm on out-of-sample GCM
output. The GPR trained on isotopic fields yields better estimates of
shallow convective moistening tendencies than GPR trained only on
conventional meteorological fields. Climate change is not well-captured
if the GPR is trained only on the control climate, but performs much
better if the training data include samples from both cool and warm
climates, and is also reasonably well-captured if the GPR is only
trained on the warm climate. The GPR algorithm is applied to isotopic
and conventional measurements from the SE Pacific and yields realistic
estimates of shallow convective moistening tendencies. Linking machine
learning with isotopic simulations and measurements provides a unique
and potentially useful framework for bridging GCMs and observations.