Interpolation of mountain weather forecasts by machine learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning-based interpolation method to improve mountain weather forecasts by leveraging surrounding plains data and past observations, focusing on Japan.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining physical forecast data with machine learning to enhance accuracy in complex mountainous terrains.

Findings

Partial RMSE improvement achieved

Significantly reduced training time

Effective feature engineering and tuning

Abstract

Recent advances in numerical simulation methods based on physical models and their combination with machine learning have improved the accuracy of weather forecasts. However, the accuracy decreases in complex terrains such as mountainous regions because these methods usually use grids of several kilometers square and simple machine learning models. While deep learning has also made significant progress in recent years, its direct application is difficult to utilize the physical knowledge used in the simulation. This paper proposes a method that uses machine learning to interpolate future weather in mountainous regions using forecast data from surrounding plains and past observed data to improve weather forecasts in mountainous regions. We focus on mountainous regions in Japan and predict temperature and precipitation mainly using LightGBM as a machine learning model. Despite the use of a small dataset, through feature engineering and model tuning, our method partially achieves improvements in the RMSE with significantly less training time.