DaYu: Data-Driven Model for Geostationary Satellite Observed Cloud Images Forecasting

TL;DR

DaYu is a transformer-based model designed for high-resolution, short-term cloud image forecasting from geostationary satellites, significantly improving accuracy within 6 hours and aiding disaster prevention.

Contribution

It introduces a novel transformer architecture tailored for satellite cloud image forecasting, achieving high accuracy and detailed short-term weather event detection.

Findings

Achieves correlation coefficients >0.9 for 3-hour forecasts

Outperforms existing methods in short-term nowcasting within 6 hours

Effectively detects mesoscale and small-scale weather events

Abstract

In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based weather forecasting methods have widely demonstrated strong competitiveness among the weather forecasting systems. However, these methods are insufficient for high-spatial-resolution short-term nowcasting within 6 hours, which is crucial for warning short-duration, mesoscale and small-scale weather events. Geostationary satellite remote sensing provides detailed, high spatio-temporal and all-day observations, which can address the above limitations of existing methods. Therefore, this paper proposed an advanced data-driven thermal infrared cloud images forecasting model, "DaYu." Unlike existing data-driven weather forecasting models, DaYu is specifically designed for geostationary satellite observations, with a temporal resolution of 0.5 hours and a spatial resolution of ${0.05}^\circ$ $\times$ ${0.05}^\circ$. DaYu is based on a large-scale transformer architecture, which enables it to capture fine-grained cloud structures and learn fast-changing spatio-temporal evolution features effectively. Moreover, its attention mechanism design achieves a balance in computational complexity, making it practical for applications. DaYu not only achieves accurate forecasts up to 3 hours with a correlation coefficient higher than 0.9, 6 hours higher than 0.8, and 12 hours higher than 0.7, but also detects short-duration, mesoscale, and small-scale weather events with enhanced detail, effectively addressing the shortcomings of existing methods in providing detailed short-term nowcasting within 6 hours. Furthermore, DaYu has significant potential in short-term climate disaster prevention and mitigation.