Estimation of Tropical Cyclone Intensity Using Multi-Platform Remote Sensing and Deep Learning with Environmental Field Information

Abstract

Accurate tropical cyclone (TC) intensity estimation is crucial for prediction and disaster prevention. Currently, significant progress has been achieved for the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in TC intensity estimation. However, many studies have overlooked the fact that the local convolution used by CNNs does not consider the global spatial relationships between pixels. Hence, they can only capture limited spatial contextual information. In addition, the special rotation invariance and symmetry structure of TC cannot be fully expressed by convolutional kernels alone. Therefore, this study proposes a new deep learning-based model for TC intensity estimation, which uses a combination of rotation equivariant convolution and Transformer to address the rotation invariance and symmetry structure of TC. Combining the two can allow capturing both local and global spatial contextual information, thereby achieving more accurate intensity estimation. Furthermore, we fused multi-platform satellite remote sensing data into the model to provide more information about the TC structure. At the same time, we integrate the physical environmental field information into the model, which can help capture the impact of these external factors on TC intensity and further improve the estimation accuracy. Finally, we use TCs from 2003 to 2015 to train our model and use 2016 and 2017 data as independent validation sets to verify our model. The overall root mean square error (RMSE) is 8.19 kt. For a subset of 482 samples (from the East Pacific and Atlantic) observed by aircraft reconnaissance, the root mean square error is 7.88 kt.