A Novel Deep Learning Approach for Tropical Cyclone Track Prediction Based on Auto-Encoder and Gated Recurrent Unit Networks

• Main Authors: Jie Lian, Pingping Dong, Yuping Zhang, Jianguo Pan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: tropical cyclone track forecast; deep learning; data-driven model; fusion model
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/11/3965

Under global climate change, the frequency of typhoons and their strong wind, heavy rain, and storm surge increase, seriously threatening the life and property of human society. However, traditional tropical cyclone track prediction methods have difficulties in processing large amounts of complex data in terms of prediction efficiency and accuracy. Recently, deep learning methods have shown a potential capability to process complex data efficiently and accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven approach based on auto-encoder (AE) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models to forecast tropical cyclone landing locations using the historical tropical cyclone tracks and various meteorological attributes. This approach fuses a data preprocessing layer, an AE layer, and a GRU layer with a customized batch process. The model is trained on a real-world tropical cyclone dataset from the years 1945–2017. Through a comparison with existing forecasting methods, the results verified that our proposed model performed around 15%, 42%, and 56% better than the Numerical Weather Prediction model (NWP) in 24, 48, and 72 h forecasts, and 27%, 13%, 17%, and 17% better than RNN, AE-RNN, GRU, and LSTM, respectively, in 24 h forecasts, using the absolute position error. In addition, a comparison of the meteorological variables indicated that the variable maximum sustained wind speed had the most significant effect on tropical cyclone track prediction.