Prediction of Long-Lead Heavy Precipitation Events Aided by Machine Learning

Abstract

Long-lead prediction of heavy precipitation events has a significant impact since it can provide an early warning of disasters, like a flood. However, the performance of existed prediction models has been constrained by the high dimensional space and non-linear relationship among variables. In this study, we study the prediction problem from the prospective of machine learning. In our machine-learning framework for forecasting heavy precipitation events, we use global hydro-meteorological variables with spatial and temporal influences as features, and the target weather events that last several days have been formulated as weather clusters. Our study has three phases: 1) identify weather clusters in different sizes, 2) handle the imbalance problem within the data, 3) select the most-relevant features through the large feature space. We plan to evaluate our methods with several real world data sets for predicting the heavy precipitation events.