Fast Gaussian Process Emulation of Mars Global Climate Model

Abstract

Abstract The NASA Ames Mars Global Climate Model (MGCM) software has been in steady use at NASA for decades and was recently released to the public. This model simulates the complex interactions of various weather cycles that exist on Mars, namely the Dust Cycle, the CO2 Cycle, and the Water cycle. Utilized by NASA, the MGCM is used to help understand their empirically observed data through the use of sensitivity studies. However, these sensitivity studies are computationally taxing, requiring weeks to run. To address this issue, we have trained a surrogate model using Gaussian processes (GP) that can emulate the output of this model with relatively small amounts of data in a reduced amount of time (on the order of minutes). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our emulator using backward error.

Keywords

• Mars Global Climate Model
• Gaussian processes
• emulation
• sensitivity study