Multi-Step Prediction of Typhoon Tracks Combining Reanalysis Image Fusion Using Laplacian Pyramid and Discrete Wavelet Transform with ConvLSTM

Abstract

Typhoons often cause huge losses, so it is significant to accurately predict typhoon tracks. Nowadays, researchers predict typhoon tracks with the single step, while the correlation of adjacent moments data is small in long-term prediction, due to the large step of time. Moreover, recursive multi-step prediction results in the accumulated error. Therefore, this paper proposes to fuse reanalysis images at the similarly historical moment and predicted images through Laplacian Pyramid and Discrete Wavelet Transform to reduce the accumulated error. That moment is determined according to the difference in the moving angle at predicted and historical moments, the color histogram similarity between predicted images and reanalysis images at historical moments and so on. Moreover, reanalysis images are weighted cascaded and input to ConvLSTM on the basis of the correlation between reanalysis data and the moving angle and distance of the typhoon. And, the Spatial Attention and weighted calculation of memory cells are added to improve the performance of ConvLSTM. This paper predicted typhoon tracks in 12 h, 18 h, 24 h and 48 h with recursive multi-step prediction. Their MAEs were 102.14 km, 168.17 km, 243.73 km and 574.62 km, respectively, which were reduced by 1.65 km, 5.93 km, 4.6 km and 13.09 km, respectively, compared with the predicted results of the improved ConvLSTM in this paper, which proved the validity of the model.