A Machine Learning Tutorial for Operational Meteorology, Part I: Traditional Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper provides an accessible survey of common machine learning methods tailored for meteorology, including practical examples and code, to help meteorologists understand and apply these techniques effectively.

Contribution

It offers a beginner-friendly overview of key machine learning methods with contextual meteorological examples and practical code resources, addressing educational gaps.

Findings

Demonstrates how to apply linear and logistic regression to meteorological data.

Shows decision trees and ensemble methods like random forest improve prediction accuracy.

Provides open-source code to facilitate adoption of machine learning in meteorology.

Abstract

Recently, the use of machine learning in meteorology has increased greatly. While many machine learning methods are not new, university classes on machine learning are largely unavailable to meteorology students and are not required to become a meteorologist. The lack of formal instruction has contributed to perception that machine learning methods are 'black boxes' and thus end-users are hesitant to apply the machine learning methods in their every day workflow. To reduce the opaqueness of machine learning methods and lower hesitancy towards machine learning in meteorology, this paper provides a survey of some of the most common machine learning methods. A familiar meteorological example is used to contextualize the machine learning methods while also discussing machine learning topics using plain language. The following machine learning methods are demonstrated: linear regression; logistic regression; decision trees; random forest; gradient boosted decision trees; naive Bayes; and support vector machines. Beyond discussing the different methods, the paper also contains discussions on the general machine learning process as well as best practices to enable readers to apply machine learning to their own datasets. Furthermore, all code (in the form of Jupyter notebooks and Google Colaboratory notebooks) used to make the examples in the paper is provided in an effort to catalyse the use of machine learning in meteorology.