Limitations of XAI methods for process-level understanding in the atmospheric sciences

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are becoming popular tools for scientific discovery in the Earth and atmospheric sciences. While these techniques have the potential to revolutionize the scientific process, there are known limitations in their applicability that are frequently ignored. These limitations include that XAI methods explain the behavior of the A.I. model, not the behavior of the training dataset, and that caution should be used when these methods are applied to datasets with correlated and dependent features. Here, we explore the potential cost associated with ignoring these limitations with a simple case-study from the atmospheric chemistry literature – learning the reaction rate of a bimolecular reaction. We demonstrate that dependent and highly correlated input features can lead to spurious process-level explanations. We posit that the current generation of XAI techniques should largely only be used for understanding system-level behavior and recommend caution when using XAI methods for process-level scientific discovery in the Earth and atmospheric sciences.