Spatial Temporal Approach for High-Resolution Gridded Wind Forecasting across Southwest Western Australia

Accurate wind speed and direction forecasting is paramount across many sectors, spanning agriculture, renewable energy generation, and bushfire management. However, conventional forecasting models encounter significant challenges in precisely predicting wind conditions at high spatial resolutions for individual locations or small geographical areas (< 20 km2) and capturing medium to long-range temporal trends and comprehensive spatio-temporal patterns. This study focuses on a spatial temporal approach for high-resolution gridded wind forecasting at the height of 3 and 10 metres across large areas of the Southwest of Western Australia to overcome these challenges. The model utilises the data that covers a broad geographic area and harnesses a diverse array of meteorological factors, including terrain characteristics, air pressure, 10-metre wind forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and limited observation data from sparsely distributed weather stations (such as 3-metre wind profiles, humidity, and temperature), the model demonstrates promising advancements in wind forecasting accuracy and reliability across the entire region of interest. This paper shows the potential of our machine learning model for wind forecasts across various prediction horizons and spatial coverage. It can help facilitate more informed decision-making and enhance resilience across critical sectors.

Unsupervised Learning of Sea Surface Height Interpolation from Multi-variate Simulated Satellite Observations

Satellite-based remote sensing missions have revolutionized our understanding of the Ocean state and dynamics. Among them, spaceborne altimetry provides valuable measurements of Sea Surface Height (SSH), which is used to estimate surface geostrophic currents. However, due to the sensor technology employed, important gaps occur in SSH observations. Complete SSH maps are produced by the altimetry community using linear Optimal Interpolations (OI) such as the widely-used Data Unification and Altimeter Combination System (DUACS). However, OI is known for producing overly smooth fields and thus misses some mesostructures and eddies. On the other hand, Sea Surface Temperature (SST) products have much higher data coverage and SST is physically linked to geostrophic currents through advection. We design a realistic twin experiment to emulate the satellite observations of SSH and SST to evaluate interpolation methods. We introduce a deep learning network able to use SST information, and a trainable in two settings: one where we have no access to ground truth during training and one where it is accessible. Our investigation involves a comparative analysis of the aforementioned network when trained using either supervised or unsupervised loss functions. We assess the quality of SSH reconstructions and further evaluate the network's performance in terms of eddy detection and physical properties. We find that it is possible, even in an unsupervised setting to use SST to improve reconstruction performance compared to SST-agnostic interpolations. We compare our reconstructions to DUACS's and report a decrease of 41\% in terms of root mean squared error.

Learning 4DVAR inversion directly from observations

Variational data assimilation and deep learning share many algorithmic aspects in common. While the former focuses on system state estimation, the latter provides great inductive biases to learn complex relationships. We here design a hybrid architecture learning the assimilation task directly from partial and noisy observations, using the mechanistic constraint of the 4DVAR algorithm. Finally, we show in an experiment that the proposed method was able to learn the desired inversion with interesting regularizing properties and that it also has computational interests.

Fusion of rain radar images and wind forecasts in a deep learning model applied to rain nowcasting

Short- or mid-term rainfall forecasting is a major task with several environmental applications such as agricultural management or flood risk monitoring. Existing data-driven approaches, especially deep learning models, have shown significant skill at this task, using only rainfall radar images as inputs. In order to determine whether using other meteorological parameters such as wind would improve forecasts, we trained a deep learning model on a fusion of rainfall radar images and wind velocity produced by a weather forecast model. The network was compared to a similar architecture trained only on radar data, to a basic persistence model and to an approach based on optical flow. Our network outperforms by 8% the F1-score calculated for the optical flow on moderate and higher rain events for forecasts at a horizon time of 30 min. Furthermore, it outperforms by 7% the same architecture trained using only rainfall radar images. Merging rain and wind data has also proven to stabilize the training process and enabled significant improvement especially on the difficult-to-predict high precipitation rainfalls.