2020/03/24 by Casper Kaae Sønderby, Sønderby, Casper Kaae, Lasse Espeholt +15 · 1 voice · 30 citations
Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Hydrological Forecasting Using AI #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #cs.LG #physics.ao-ph #stat.ML
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.12140
arxiv published 2020/03/24 · arxiv created 2020/03/30 · arxiv updated 2020/03/31
Weather forecasting is a long standing scientific challenge with direct social and economic impact. The task is suitable for deep neural networks due to vast amounts of continuously collected data and a rich spatial and temporal structure that presents long range dependencies. We introduce MetNet, a neural network that forecasts precipitation up to 8 hours into the future at the high spatial resolution of 1 km2 and at the temporal resolution of 2 minutes with a latency in the order of seconds. MetNet takes as input radar and satellite data and forecast lead time and produces a probabilistic precipitation map. The architecture uses axial self-attention to aggregate the global context from a large input patch corresponding to a million square kilometers. We evaluate the performance of MetNet at various precipitation thresholds and find that MetNet outperforms Numerical Weather Prediction at forecasts of up to 7 to 8 hours on the scale of the continental United States.