Short-term local weather forecast using dense weather station by deep neural network

Abstract

This paper proposes a very-short-term, i.e., less than 1-hour, local weather forecast method. In general, a short-term weather forecast within 3 hours is difficult due to lack of surface weather data and limitations of computation resources. However, such a short-term prediction is getting more and more anticipated in several industrial situations such as transportation, retailing business, agriculture, and energy management as well as our daily life. To keep up with this huge demands, services based on very-short-term weather forecast began to be provided. Data sources for such kind of forecast are private company-owned surface sensor networks in addition to nation-owned surface sensors. Some surface weather sensors of private companies are more densely distributed than nation-owned sensors. We call these surface weather sensor network as dense weather stations. Among them, for example, POTEKA sensors are located in roughly every 2 to 3 km and provide observed data every minute through mobile network. Those dense sensors are spreading its locations over the world. However, a data mining technique for such a device has not been well developed. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture specifically developed for the short-term weather forecasting based on the dense weather station device. Our proposal consists of two folds: point prediction model and tensor prediction model. The point prediction model is useful for forecasting exactly on the location of the dense weather station. The tensor prediction model interpolate the prediction of the point prediction model to cover whole range of locations around the interested area. It is shown that our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods such as XGBoost and support vector machines using a large real observed data.