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Structural Similarity Guided Siamese U-Net Model for Detecting Changes in Snow Water Equivalent

2025· preprint· en· W4408350400 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Karim Malik, Colin Robertson

Bibliographic record

VenuePreprints.org · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicCryospheric studies and observations
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSnowNet (polyhedron)Similarity (geometry)Water equivalentStructural similarityEnvironmental scienceComputer scienceMathematicsArtificial intelligenceGeographyMeteorologyImage (mathematics)Geometry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Snow water equivalent (SWE), the amount of water generated when a snowpack melts, has been used to study the impacts of climate change on the cryosphere processes and snow cover dynamics during the winter season. In most analyses, high temporal resolution SWE and SD data are aggregated into monthly and yearly averages to detect and characterize change. Aggregating snow measurements, however, can magnify the modifiable aerial unit problem, resulting in differing snow trends at different temporal resolutions. Time series analysis of gridded SWE data holds the potential to unravel the impacts of climate change and global warming on daily, weekly, and monthly changes in snow during the winter season. Consequently, this research presents a high temporal resolution analysis of change in SWE across the cold regions of Canada. A Siamese UNet is developed by modifying the model’s last layer to incorporate the SSIM index. The similarity score from the SSIM index is passed to a contrastive loss function where the optimization process maximizes SSIM index values for a pair of similar SWE images and minimizes the values for a pair of dissimilar SWE images. The model predicts interannual SWE to decline steadily from 1979 – 2018, with March being the month in which the most significant change occurs (R2 = 0.1, p-value < 0.05). The findings imply that by coupling high temporal resolution datasets with the SSIM index and fully-convolutional deep neural networks, snow dynamics and cryosphere processes in response to climate-forcing agents can be effectively modeled and understood.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.043
Threshold uncertainty score0.085

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.233
GPT teacher head0.349
Teacher spread0.116 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venuePreprints.org→Same topicCryospheric studies and observations→French-language works237,207→