Interpolation of environmental data using deep learning and model inference

Abstract

The temporal resolution of environmental data sets plays a major role in the granularity of the information that can be derived from the data. In most cases, it is required that different data sets have a common temporal resolution to enable their consistent evaluations and applications in making informed decisions. This study leverages deep learning with long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks and model inference to enhance the temporal resolution of climate datasets, specifically temperature, and precipitation, from daily to sub-daily scales. We trained our model to learn the relationship between daily and sub-daily data, subsequently applying this knowledge to increase the resolution of a separate dataset with a coarser (daily) temporal resolution. Our findings reveal a high degree of accuracy for temperature predictions, evidenced by a correlation of 0.99 and a mean absolute error of 0.21 °C, between the actual and predicted sub-daily values. In contrast, the approach was less effective for precipitation, achieving an explained variance of only 37%, compared to 98% for temperature. Further, besides the sub-daily interpolation of the climate data sets, we adapted our approach to increase the resolution of the Normalized difference vegetation index of Landsat (from 16 d to 5 d interval) using the LSTM model pre-trained from the Sentinel 2 Normalized difference vegetation index—that exists at a relatively higher temporal resolution. The explained variance between the predicted Landsat and Sentinel 2 data is 70% with a mean absolute error of 0.03. These results suggest that our method is particularly suitable for environmental datasets with less pronounced short-term variability, offering a promising tool for improving the resolution and utility of the data.