Rainfall Forecasting Using Neural Network: A Survey

An accurate rainfall forecasting is very important for agriculture dependent countries like India. For analyzing the crop productivity, use of water resources and pre-planning of water resources, rainfall prediction is important. Statistical techniques for rainfall forecasting cannot perform well for long-term rainfall forecasting due to the dynamic nature of climate phenomena. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have become very popular, and prediction using ANN is one of the most widely used techniques for rainfall forecasting. This paper provides a detailed survey and comparison of different neural network architectures used by researchers for rainfall forecasting. The paper also discusses the issues while applying different neural networks for yearly/monthly/daily rainfall forecasting. Moreover, the paper also presents different accuracy measures used by researchers for evaluating performance of ANN.