WHAT IDENTIFIES A WHALE BY ITS FLUKE? ON THE BENEFIT OF INTERPRETABLE MACHINE LEARNING FOR WHALE IDENTIFICATION

A recent statistical approach for studying relations in the Earth system is to train deep learning (DL) models to predict Earth system variables given one or several others and use interpretable DL to analyze the relations learned by the models. Here, we propose to combine the approach with a theorem from causality research to ensure that the deep learning model learns causal rather than spurious relations. As an example, we apply the method to study soil-moisture–precipitation coupling.

Ozone is a toxic greenhouse gas with high spatial variability. We present a machine-learning-based ozone-mapping workflow generating a transparent and reliable product. Going beyond standard mapping methods, this work combines explainable machine learning with uncertainty assessment to increase the integrity of the produced map.

With the AQ-Bench dataset, we contribute to shared data usage and machine learning methods in the field of environmental science. The AQ-Bench dataset contains air quality data and metadata from more than 5500 air quality observation stations all over the world. The dataset offers a low-threshold entrance to machine learning on a real-world environmental dataset. AQ-Bench thus provides a blueprint for environmental benchmark datasets.