Predicting Hurricane Trajectories using a Recurrent Neural Network
This work addresses hurricane forecasting to reduce economic loss and save lives, but it is incremental as it applies an existing RNN method to this domain.
The authors tackled hurricane trajectory prediction by applying a recurrent neural network (RNN) to weather data, achieving competitive accuracy with existing methods and predicting paths up to approximately 120 hours.
Hurricanes are cyclones circulating about a defined center whose closed wind speeds exceed 75 mph originating over tropical and subtropical waters. At landfall, hurricanes can result in severe disasters. The accuracy of predicting their trajectory paths is critical to reduce economic loss and save human lives. Given the complexity and nonlinearity of weather data, a recurrent neural network (RNN) could be beneficial in modeling hurricane behavior. We propose the application of a fully connected RNN to predict the trajectory of hurricanes. We employed the RNN over a fine grid to reduce typical truncation errors. We utilized their latitude, longitude, wind speed, and pressure publicly provided by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) to predict the trajectory of a hurricane at 6-hour intervals. Results show that this proposed technique is competitive to methods currently employed by the NHC and can predict up to approximately 120 hours of hurricane path.