Advancing Photochemistry Simulation in WRF-Chem V4.0: Artificial
Intelligence PhotoChemistry (AIPC) Scheme with Multi-Head Self-Attention
Algorithm
Abstract
Atmospheric photochemistry is essential for simulating atmospheric
composition, impacting air quality and climate change. However,
conventional numerical schemes of photochemistry within atmospheric
models are computationally expensive, leading to simplifications or
omissions of critical processes in weather and climate models. Previous
attempts to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) scheme to reduce
computational costs have faced obstacles such as the curse of
dimensionality and error propagation, and most have been limited to box
models without coupling into numerical models. Here, we develop an
innovative AI PhotoChemistry (AIPC) scheme coupled into an atmospheric
model (WRF-Chem). With Multi-Head Self-Attention algorithm (MHSA), we
simulate 74 chemical species and 229 reactions following the SAPRC-99
mechanism. This marks the first implementation of a sophisticated
photochemical mechanism within one unified AI model, enabling fast,
accurate, and stable simulations without needing individual AI model for
each species as previous works. Comparative analysis reveals that the
AIPC scheme outperforms previous AI schemes using Multi-Layer Perceptron
and Residual Neural Network algorithms, offering superior accuracy and
computational efficiency. Moreover, fine-tuning learning rate and
broadening network width within the MHSA algorithm are more effective
for improving the AIPC scheme’s performance than adjusting batch size or
increasing network depth. When coupling AIPC into WRF-Chem, this hybrid
model with both physics and AI schemes reproduces the spatiotemporal
distributions of various species on monthly time scale, and achieves
substantial speed enhancement with ~8 times faster than
conventional scheme. This advancement lays the groundwork for future
development of weather and climate models with sophisticated chemical
processes.