Latent data assimilation with non-explicit observation operator in hydrology

Wang, K., Cheng, S., Piggott, M., Dance, S. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1690-3338, Wang, Y. and Arcucci, R. (2025) Latent data assimilation with non-explicit observation operator in hydrology. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. e5009. ISSN 1477-870X doi: 10.1002/qj.5009

Abstract/Summary

Natural hazards can cause significant damage to human life and property. Among them, floods are one of the most severe and frequent natural disasters, making flood prediction crucial. River discharge is an essential factor in causing floods, so accurate and fast predicting river discharge is crucial for flood mitigation. Data assimilation (DA) as a method of combining different sources of data (e.g., state field and observations) has the ability to estimate the possible states of the river discharge. However, DA on high dimensional data such as river discharge can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, when the DA process lacks explicit mappings from the state field to the observations, DA cannot be effectively conducted. In this work, we design a latent neural mapping (LNM) in the form of a neural network (NN) as the observation operator and integrate this within a 3D-Variational DA framework. By operating within the latent space, the resulting approach helps mitigate computational costs and allow us to run DA within seconds despite the high dimensional data. In addition, several alternative NNs are employed to build mapping functions, which map data from the state space to the observation space (and vice versa), and benchmarked against the latent space based LNM approach. We test the LNM with real river discharge data from the UK and Ireland. The National River Flow Archive (NRFA) dataset provides the observations, and the data provided by a surrogate model from the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) dataset served as the state field. LNM outperforms the alternative methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The developed LNM can be applied to areas other than hydrology to efficiently integrate data with models.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/122635
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/qj.5009
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	Royal Meteorological Society
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