The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. The spatio-temporal nature of the climate system motivates the adaptation of super-resolution image processing techniques to statistical downscaling. In our work, we present DeepSD, a generalized stacked super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) framework with multi-scale input channels for statistical downscaling of climate variables. A comparison of DeepSD to four state-of-the-art methods downscaling daily precipitation from 1 degree (~100km) to 1/8 degrees (~12.5km) over the Continental United States. Furthermore, a framework using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform is discussed for downscaling more than 20 ESM models with multiple emission scenarios.

Deep Learning (DL) methods have been transforming computer vision with innovative adaptations to other domains including climate change. For DL to pervade Science and Engineering (S&EE) applications where risk management is a core component, well-characterized uncertainty estimates must accompany predictions. However, S&E observations and model-simulations often follow heavily skewed distributions and are not well modeled with DL approaches, since they usually optimize a Gaussian, or Euclidean, likelihood loss. Recent developments in Bayesian Deep Learning (BDL), which attempts to capture uncertainties from noisy observations, aleatoric, and from unknown model parameters, epistemic, provide us a foundation. Here we present a discrete-continuous BDL model with Gaussian and lognormal likelihoods for uncertainty quantification (UQ). We demonstrate the approach by developing UQ estimates on "DeepSD'', a super-resolution based DL model for Statistical Downscaling (SD) in climate applied to precipitation, which follows an extremely skewed distribution. We find that the discrete-continuous models outperform a basic Gaussian distribution in terms of predictive accuracy and uncertainty calibration. Furthermore, we find that the lognormal distribution, which can handle skewed distributions, produces quality uncertainty estimates at the extremes. Such results may be important across S&E, as well as other domains such as finance and economics, where extremes are often of significant interest. Furthermore, to our knowledge, this is the first UQ model in SD where both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties are characterized.

Natural hazards, such as hurricanes and winter storms, computer glitches and technical flaws, and man-made terror or cyber-physical attacks, can lead to localized perturbations of the U.S. national airspace system airport network (NASAN), which can in turn percolate across the interconnected system. Here we develop and demonstrate an approach to quantitatively characterize the robustness of NASAN, defined as loss of critical functions owing to perturbations, and a quantitative framework to select the most efficient and effective post-hazard recovery strategies. The system-level robustness and recovery strategies rely on network science methods and associated attributes. New insights include the central role of network attributes to robustness and optimal recovery sequences. Characterizations of robustness and fragility can inform what-if plans and proactive design, while recovery strategies developed in advance can support systematic, reliable, and timely bounce-back from hazard-related perturbations. The framework can serve as a baseline over which local information or cost optimization can be superposed.

The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. Depending on statistical modeling choices, downscaled projections have been shown to vary significantly terms of accuracy and reliability. The spatio-temporal nature of the climate system motivates the adaptation of super-resolution image processing techniques to statistical downscaling. In our work, we present DeepSD, a generalized stacked super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) framework for statistical downscaling of climate variables. DeepSD augments SRCNN with multi-scale input channels to maximize predictability in statistical downscaling. We provide a comparison with Bias Correction Spatial Disaggregation as well as three Automated-Statistical Downscaling approaches in downscaling daily precipitation from 1 degree (~100km) to 1/8 degrees (~12.5km) over the Continental United States. Furthermore, a framework using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform is discussed for downscaling more than 20 ESM models with multiple emission scenarios.

In this paper we present the first analysis of facial responses to electoral debates measured automatically over the Internet. We show that significantly different responses can be detected from viewers with different political preferences and that similar expressions at significant moments can have very different meanings depending on the actions that appear subsequently. We used an Internet based framework to collect 611 naturalistic and spontaneous facial responses to five video clips from the 3rd presidential debate during the 2012 American presidential election campaign. Using this framework we were able to collect over 60% of these video responses (374 videos) within one day of the live debate and over 80% within three days. No participants were compensated for taking the survey. We present and evaluate a method for predicting independent voter preference based on automatically measured facial responses and self-reported preferences from the viewers. We predict voter preference with an average accuracy of over 73% (AUC 0.779).