Calibration of Typhoon Track Forecasts Based on Deep Learning Methods

Abstract

An accurate forecast of typhoon tracks is crucial for disaster warning and mitigation. However, existing numerical weather prediction models, such as the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, still exhibit significant errors in track forecasts. This study aims to improve forecast accuracy by correcting WRF-forecasted tracks using deep learning models, including Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) + Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) + Wide and Deep Learning (WDL), BiLSTM + Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) + WDL, and BiLSTM + ConvLSTM + Extreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM), with a comparison to the Kalman Filter. The results demonstrate that the BiLSTM + ConvLSTM + WDL model reduces the 72 h track prediction error (TPE) from 255.18 km to 159.23 km, representing a 37.6% improvement over the original WRF model, and exhibits significant advantages across all evaluation metrics, particularly in key indicators such as Bias2, Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Sequence. The decomposition of MSE further validates the importance of the BiLSTM, ConvLSTM, WDL, and Temporal Normalization (TN) layers in enhancing the model’s spatio-temporal feature-capturing ability.