Short-term wind speed forecasting bias correction in the Hangzhou area of China based on a machine learning model

Accurate wind speed forecasting is of great societal importance. In this study, the short-term wind speed fore-casting bias at automatic meteorological stations in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, was corrected using an XGBoost machine learning model called WSFBC-XGB. The products of the local NWP (numerical weather pre-diction) system were used as the inputs of WSFBC-XGB. The WSFBC-XGB-corrected results were compared with those corrected using the traditional MOS (model output statistics) method. Results showed that WSFBC-XGB per-formed better than MOS, with the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs)/accuracy rates of the wind speed forecasting (ACCs) of WSFBC-XGB being reduced/ promoted by 26.1% and 7.64%/35.6% and 7.02% relative to NWP and MOS, respectively. The RMSEs/ACCs of WSFBC-XGB were smaller/higher than those of MOS at 90% stations. In addition, the mean decrease in impurity method was used to analyze the interpretability of WSFBC-XGB to help users gain trust in the model. Results showed that the four most important features were the wind speed at 10 m (47.35%), meridional component of wind at 10 m (12.73%), diurnal cycle (9.97%), and meridional component of wind at 1000 hPa (7.45%). The WSFBC-XGB model will help improve the accuracy of short-term wind speed forecasting and provide support for large-scale outdoor activities.