Diagnostic models in PhysicsNeMo (precipitation)#

This example contains code for training diagnostic models (models predicting an additional variable from the atmospheric state) using PhysicsNeMo. It shows how to use PhysicsNeMo to train a diagnostic model predicting precipitation from ERA-5 data.

Installation#

Installing PhysicsNeMo#

You need PhysicsNeMo installed on your Python environment, installed with the launch extras. If installing from the PhysicsNeMo repository, install PhysicsNeMo by running:

pip install .[launch]

in the PhysicsNeMo directory.

Installing dependencies#

You need to install the dependencies for the dataset download and the diagnostic model.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Data Preparation#

Downloading ERA5 Data#

This example requires two sets of ERA5 data:

  1. Atmospheric state variables (input data)

  2. Diagnostic variables (target data), i.e. precipitation

You can use the ERA5 downloader in the dataset_download example to obtain both datasets. For each dataset, you’ll need to:

  1. Create a configuration file specifying the variables you want to download

  2. Run the download script pointing to that configuration

  3. Store the datasets in separate directories

For example:

# Download state variables
python dataset_download/start_mirror.py --config-name="config_34var.yaml"

# Download precipitation (create a new config with precipitation variable)
python dataset_download/start_mirror.py --config-name="config_precip.yaml"

Data Format and Structure#

The settings for the precipitation model training are in the config/diagnostic_precip.yaml file. The ERA5 atmospheric state data is loaded from the directory indicated in sources.state_params.data_dir and the target (precipitation) data from sources.diag_params.data_dir. Both directories are assumed contain the subdirectories train/ (for training data) and test/ (for validation data). These should contain yearly data files:

├── data_dir
    ├── train/
    │   ├── 1980.h5
    │   ├── 1981.h5
    │   └── ...
    ├── test/
    │   ├── 2017.h5
    │   └── ...
    ├── out_of_sample/
    │   └── 2018.h5
    └── stats/
        ├── global_means.npy
        └── global_stds.npy

Each HDF5 file contains:

  • Data shape: (time_steps, channels, latitude, longitude)

  • Latitude: 721 points (-90° to 90°)

  • Longitude: 1440 points (-180° to 180°)

  • Channels: One per variable/pressure level combination

For more details on the data format, see the ClimateDataSourceSpec class in physicsnemo.datapipes.climate.climate.

Alphabetical order is used to determine the order of the files. The years you put in train/, test/ and out_of_sample respectively can differ from the example above, but you should make sure that they are consistent between the state data and target data. The training code does perform some sanity checks to ensure that the inputs are consistent in time, but these should not be assumed to be foolproof.

Additionally, to use geopotential (effectively the terrain height) and the land-sea mask (LSM) as predictors, you can set datapipe.geopotential_filename and datapipe.lsm_filename, respectively. Alternatively you can delete these lines from the configuration file, which will lead to the model being trained without these variables as inputs.

Input Channel Configuration#

The diagnostic_precip.yaml configuration assumes an HDF5-format ERA5 training dataset with variables specified in sources.state_params.variables.

Set model.in_channels to match your total input channels:

  • Base: Length of sources.state_params.variables

  • Additional channels:

    • Cosine zenith angle: +1 if sources.state_params.use_cos_zenith == True

    • Geopotential: +1 if datapipe.geopotential_filename is set

    • Land-sea mask: +1 if datapipe.lsm_filename is set

    • Lat/lon encoding: +4 if datapipe.use_latlon == True

Training#

Start training from scratch#

To start training of the model, go to the scripts directory and run

python train_diagnostic_precip.py

You can modify and add configuration settings from the command line using the Hydra syntax.

Continue training from checkpoint#

This will continue training from the latest checkpoint:

python train_diagnostic_precip.py +training.load_epoch=latest

Alternatively, you can specify the epoch number instead of “latest”. The checkpoint directory is defined in training.checkpoint_dir in the configuration file.

Multi-GPU training#

Multiple GPUs will be detected automatically. You can start training using multiple GPUs using:

mpirun -np <NUM_GPUS> python train_diagnostic_precip.py --config-name="diagnostic_precip.yaml"

where NUM_GPUS is the number of GPUs you’re training on. Pass also the --allow-run-as-root parameter to mpirun if running in a container as the root user.

Testing#

You can evaluate the model using out-of-sample data with the eval_diagnostic_precip.py script that uses the same config file as the training:

python eval_diagnostic_precip.py +training.load_epoch=latest

This performs the testing with the data in the out_of_sample directory. It computes the root-mean-square error for each point on the grid and saves the result in scripts/results/rmse.npy. You can add more metrics by following the example of RMSECallback in eval_diagnostic_precip.py.