Development of Surface Weather Forecast Model by using LSTM Machine Learning Method

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models play an essential role in predicting weather factors, but using them is challenging due to various factors. To overcome the difficulties of NWP models, deep learning models have been deployed in weather forecasting by several recent studies. This study adapts long short-term memory (LSTM), which demonstrates remarkable performance in time-series prediction. The combination of LSTM model input of meteorological features and activation functions have a significant impact on the performance therefore, the results from 5 combinations of input features and 4 activation functions are analyzed in 9 Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) stations corresponding to cities/ islands/mountains. The optimized LSTM model produces better performance within eight forecast hours than Local Data Assimilation and Prediction System (LDAPS) operated by Korean meteorological administration. Therefore, this study illustrates that this LSTM model can be usefully applied to very short-term weather forecasting, and further studies about CNN-LSTM model with 2-D spatial convolution neural network (CNN) coupled in LSTM are required for improvement.