Improving Ensemble Forecasts of Abnormally Deflecting Tropical Cyclones with Fused Atmosphere-Ocean-Terrain Data
This addresses a critical limitation in tropical cyclone forecasting for meteorologists and disaster management, though it appears to be a domain-specific advancement rather than a fundamental breakthrough.
The authors tackled the problem of forecasting abnormally deflecting tropical cyclones by creating a multimodal dataset (AOT-TCs) that fuses atmosphere, ocean, and terrain data, and developing a model with explicit cross-domain coupling. Their model achieved state-of-the-art performance for both normal and abnormal TC forecasting in the Northwest Pacific basin from 2017-2024.
Deep learning-based tropical cyclone (TC) forecasting methods have demonstrated significant potential and application advantages, as they feature much lower computational cost and faster operation speed than numerical weather prediction models. However, existing deep learning methods still have key limitations: they can only process a single type of sequential trajectory data or homogeneous meteorological variables, and fail to achieve accurate forecasting of abnormal deflected TCs. To address these challenges, we present two groundbreaking contributions. First, we have constructed a multimodal and multi-source dataset named AOT-TCs for TC forecasting in the Northwest Pacific basin. As the first dataset of its kind, it innovatively integrates heterogeneous variables from the atmosphere, ocean, and land, thus obtaining a comprehensive and information-rich meteorological dataset. Second, based on the AOT-TCs dataset, we propose a forecasting model that can handle both normal and abnormally deflected TCs. This is the first TC forecasting model to adopt an explicit atmosphere-ocean-terrain coupling architecture, enabling it to effectively capture complex interactions across physical domains. Extensive experiments on all TC cases in the Northwest Pacific from 2017 to 2024 show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in TC forecasting: it not only significantly improves the forecasting accuracy of normal TCs but also breaks through the technical bottleneck in forecasting abnormally deflected TCs.