forecasting, their model outperforms the dynamical
NWP model and the persistence model.
Recently, a model based on convolutional LSTM
has been proposed (Shi et al., 2015) to address the
precipitation nowcasting problem using a radar echo
dataset. The author claimed that the network learns
spatio-temporal correlations better. It also consis-
tently outperforms fully connected LSTM networks.
The authors in (Sønderby et al., 2020) have pro-
posed MetNet, a deep neural network that predicts
precipitation up to 8 hours into the future and pro-
duces a probabilistic precipitation map. The model
takes satellite data and radar data as inputs. The in-
put has a spatial resolution of 1 km
2
and a temporal
resolution of 2 minutes. The architecture of MetNet
uses axial self-attention to capture the spatial depen-
dencies in the input data and aggregate the global con-
text information. The resulting forecasts of MetNet
outperform the baseline numerical weather prediction
model.
3 PROBLEM STATEMENT
In this paper, we have addressed the problem of mul-
tivariable weather forecasting for the next six time
steps in the future based on given ∆t and current
weather conditions. We have used U-Net, deep CNN
architecture for weather forecasting.
4 DATASET FOR MULTI-FIELD
PREDICTION
The weather data is obtained from the National Cen-
ter for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting website,
which is governed by India Meteorological Depart-
ment (IMD). It is cited in a footnote
1
. The dataset is
collected for the state of Madhya Pradesh from Jan-
uary to December of 1989 through 2018. It has a spa-
tial resolution of 0.12
◦
x 0.12
◦
and a temporal resolu-
tion of 1 hour.
The input fields considered for multi-field pre-
diction are 2m-Temperature, Mean Sea Level Pres-
sure, Surface Pressure, Wind Velocity, Model Terrain
Height, Intensity of Solar Radiation, and Relative Hu-
midity.
1
www.ncmrwf.gov.in
5 TIME SERIES FORECASTING
A time series is a sequence of data points ordered in
time. In the usual machine learning dataset, all the
observations are treated equally for training and pre-
diction. But in a time series dataset, it provides an ad-
ditional source of information in the form of the order
of time, which must be analysed for making accurate
predictions.
Deep convolutional neural networks are capable
of automatically extracting important features from a
given dataset. The same characteristic of deep CNN
can also be used for time series forecasting, where the
network learns the temporal and spatial dependence
between the variables.
6 MODEL DESCRIPTION
The model that we have proposed is based on deep
CNN architecture. The multidimensional state of the
atmosphere at time t is represented as x(t), which is
given as input to the U-Net model and predicts the
multidimensional future state of the atmosphere, y(t +
∆t). Here, ∆t is the difference between the time scale
of the input state and the predicted state. The model’s
main advantage is that we can generate continuous
time series of future states by feeding the predicted
states back into the weather model. Mathematically,
it can be written as,
y(t + k∆t) =
(
f (x(t)) k = 0
f (y(t + (k − 1)∆t)) k ≥ 0,
(1)
J
total
=
T
∑
n=1
||x(t + n∆t) − y(t + n∆t)||
2
(2)
In equation (1), the function f(.) represents the U-
net model and y(t + k∆t) represents the multidimen-
sional state of the atmosphere predicted by the U-Net
model. In order, to enforce the model towards learn-
ing longer-term weather dependencies, we train the
model to minimize error on multiple iterated predic-
tive steps using a multi-time-step loss function.
J
total
in equation (2) represents the total loss ob-
tained after multiple iterated predictive steps. We
chose T = 2 for computational efficiency. That is,
once the U-Net model predicts y(t + k∆ t) as out-
put, it is used as input again to minimise the er-
ror. As the dataset is large, we have created a custom
data generator to process the data for ingestion into
the model. The data generator is defined as a four-
dimensional array. The first dimension represents i/o
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