Performances of deep learning models for Indian Ocean wind speed prediction

Abstract

A wind speed forecasting technique, using deep learning architectures based on long short-term memory (LSTM) model and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model is presented in this work. The coastal belts of the Indian peninsula are vulnerable to natural disasters like storm surges and inundations due to cyclones each year. The wind speed is a major parameter for analyzing extreme weather events. Prediction using numerical models is not efficient enough due to the irregular patterns in the data and, thus, deep neural network models involving many layers have been tested. The shallow feed-forward model has also been considered along with deep learning models to estimate future values from past data. The present work employs a comparison study of different models to forecast wind speed time series at two locations in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, respectively, having different dynamics and randomness. For training the models, daily wind speed data are considered for the period 2006–2017 and an independent validation set is chosen comprising 2018 wind speed data to check the accuracy. To evaluate forecast efficiency among different network models fitted to given time series, mean square error (MSE) and root mean square error (RMSE) have been computed. Multiple experiments are conducted with different hidden unit values and epoch values to obtain the minimum error. Regression equations generated may be used for forecasting future time series. The BiLSTM model connecting hidden states of opposite directions proved to be most efficient for the wind speed forecasting in different regions.