Al-Biruni Based Optimization of Rainfall Forecasting in Ethiopia

Abstract

Rainfall plays a significant role in managing the water level in the reservoir. The unpredictable amount of rainfall due to the climate change can cause either overflow or dry in the reservoir. Many individuals, especially those in the agricultural sector, rely on rain forecasts. Forecasting rainfall is challenging because of the changing nature of the weather. The area of Jimma in southwest Oromia, Ethiopia is the subject of this research, which aims to develop a rainfall forecasting model. To estimate Jimma’s daily rainfall, we propose a novel approach based on optimizing the parameters of long short-term memory (LSTM) using Al-Biruni earth radius (BER) optimization algorithm for boosting the forecasting accuracy. Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency (NSE), mean square error (MSE), root MSE (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and R2 were all used in the conducted experiments to assess the proposed approach, with final scores of (0.61), (430.81), (19.12), and (11.09), respectively. Moreover, we compared the proposed model to current machine-learning regression models; such as non-optimized LSTM, bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM). It was found that the proposed approach achieved the lowest RMSE of (19.12). In addition, the experimental results show that the proposed model has R2 with a value outperforming the other models, which confirms the superiority of the proposed approach. On the other hand, a statistical analysis is performed to measure the significance and stability of the proposed approach and the recorded results proved the expected performance.