Predicting Hurricane Trajectories Using a Recurrent Neural Network

Presented by

Yishu Duan, Xibei Di, Xin Yan

Introduction

Hurricanes originate in the warm water of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, and generally travel from their origin to the north, northwest, or northeast. Hurricanes are usually accompanied by strong winds, heavy rainfall, and dangerous tides, as one of the most common natural disasters on the planet, hurricanes could threaten the safety of people’s economic property assets and human lives. This makes predicting the hurricane paths by modeling the hurricane behavior extremely essential.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a kind of artificial neural networks, where the weights of it can be modified to make the model learn complex dynamic time-dependent behavior. A RNN can effectively simulate the complex nonlinear temporal relationship of hurricanes, which can improve the future prediction of the accuracy of hurricane path.

Thus, in this paper, fully connected recurrent neural networks using a grid model are built for hurricane track prediction, and the result will be compared with other hurricane predicting techniques.

Related Work

Scientists had been advocating in developing models for predicting and tracking hurricane paths, and had been persistently improving the accuracy over the past decades, whereas these currently existing models are quite different from each other in terms of the structure as well as the complexity. The four main types of models currently used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) include:

1. Dynamical models

• • Complex since the highest computing power is desired to deal with equations of physical motions.
  • Ex. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Hurricane Prediction System (by Kurihara, Tuleya, and Bender, 1998)

1. Statistical models

• • Light-weight since only statistical formulas are used.
  • Ex. Statistical non-parametric model (by Hall and Jewson, 2007)

1. Statistical-dynamical models

• • Allows large-scale variables as predictors.
  • Ex. Statistical-dynamical model (by Wang et al., 2009)

1. Ensemble or consensus models

• • Gives a combination of predictions from different models, physical parameters, or initial conditions.
  • Ex. Sparse Recurrent Neural Network (by Moradi Kordmahalleh, Gorji Sefidmazgi, and Homai-far, 2016)

However, since there are not enough collected hurricane observations, and the atmospheric systems are nonlinear and complex, the predictive ability of linear models is limited. Thus, a network that is capable of modeling the hurricane's time-dependent behaviours is desired.