Accelerated parameter identification in a 3D marine biogeochemical model using surrogate-based optimization

We present the application of the Surrogate-based Optimization (SBO) method on a parameter identification problem for a 3-D biogeochemical model. SBO is a method for acceleration of optimization processes when the underlying model itself is of very high computational complexity. In these cases, coupled simulation runs require large amounts of computer time, where optimization runs may become unfeasible even with high-performance hardware. As a consequence, the key idea of SBO is to replace the original and computationally expensive (high-fidelity) model by a so-called surrogate, which is created from a less accurate but computationally cheaper (low-fidelity) model and a suitable correction approach to increase its accuracy. To date, the SBO approach has been widely and successfully used in engineering applications and also for parameter identification in a 1-D marine ecosystem model of NPZD type. In this paper, we apply the approach onto a two-component biogeochemical model. The model is spun-up into a steady seasonal cycle via the Transport Matrix Approach. The low-fidelity model we use consists of a reduced number of spin-up iterations (several decades instead of millennia used for the original model). A multiplicative correction operator is further exploited to extrapolate the rather inaccurate low-fidelity model onto the original one. This corrected model builds our surrogate. We validate this SBO method by twin-experiments that use synthetic observations generated by the original model. We motivate our choice of the low-fidelity model and the multiplicative correction and discuss the computational advantage of SBO in comparison to an expensive parameter optimization in the context of the high-fidelity model. The proposed SBO technique is shown to yield a solution close to the target at a significant gain of computational efficiency. Without further regularization techniques, the method is able to identify most model parameters. The method is simple to implement and presents a promising and pragmatic tool to calibrate biogeochemical models in a global three-dimensional setting.