Interpolation of mountain weather forecasts by machine learning
This work addresses the specific challenge of improving weather forecasts in mountainous regions, which is an incremental advancement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of low accuracy in mountain weather forecasts by using machine learning to interpolate future weather from surrounding plains data and past observations, achieving partial improvements in RMSE with significantly reduced training time.
Recent advances in numerical simulation methods based on physical models and their combination with machine learning have improved the accuracy of weather forecasts. However, the accuracy decreases in complex terrains such as mountainous regions because these methods usually use grids of several kilometers square and simple machine learning models. While deep learning has also made significant progress in recent years, its direct application is difficult to utilize the physical knowledge used in the simulation. This paper proposes a method that uses machine learning to interpolate future weather in mountainous regions using forecast data from surrounding plains and past observed data to improve weather forecasts in mountainous regions. We focus on mountainous regions in Japan and predict temperature and precipitation mainly using LightGBM as a machine learning model. Despite the use of a small dataset, through feature engineering and model tuning, our method partially achieves improvements in the RMSE with significantly less training time.