A Deep Spatio-Temporal ForecastingModel for Multi-SiteWeather Prediction Post-Processing

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a deep spatio-temporal forecasting model (Deep- STF) for multi-site weather prediction post-processing by using both temporal and spatial information. In our proposed framework, the spatio-temporal information is modeled by a CNN (convolutional neural network) module and an encoder-decoder structure with the attention mechanism. The novelty of our work lies in that our model takes full account of temporal and spatial characteristics and obtain forecasts of multiple meteorological stations simultaneously by using the same framework. We apply the DeepSTF model to short-term weather prediction at 226 meteorological stations in Beijing. It significantly improves the short-term forecasts compared to other widely used benchmark models including the Model Output Statistics method. In order to evaluate the uncertainty of the model parameters, we estimate the confidence intervals by bootstrapping. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the DeepSTF model has strong stability. Finally, we evaluate the impact of seasonal changes and topographical differences on the accuracy of the model predictions. The results indicate that our proposed model has high prediction accuracy.