Exploring the Use of Machine Learning to Improve Vertical Profiles of Temperature and Moisture

Abstract Vertical profiles of temperature and dewpoint are useful in predicting deep convection that leads to severe weather which threatens property and lives. Currently, forecasters rely on observations from radiosonde launches and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Radiosonde observations are, however, temporally and spatially sparse, and NWP models contain inherent errors that influence short-term predictions of high impact events. This work explores using machine learning (ML) to postprocess NWP model forecasts, combining them with satellite data to improve vertical profiles of temperature and dewpoint. We focus on different ML architectures, loss functions, and input features to optimize predictions. Because we are predicting vertical profiles at 256 levels in the atmosphere, this work provides a unique perspective at using ML for 1-D tasks. Compared to baseline profiles from the Rapid Refresh (RAP), ML predictions offer the largest improvement for dewpoint, particularly in the mid- and upper-atmosphere. Temperature improvements are modest, but CAPE values are improved by up to 40%. Feature importance analyses indicate that the ML models are primarily improving incoming RAP biases. While additional model and satellite data offer some improvement to the predictions, architecture choice is more important than feature selection in fine-tuning the results. Our proposed deep residual UNet performs the best by leveraging spatial context from the input RAP profiles; however, the results are remarkably robust across model architecture. Further, uncertainty estimates for every level are well-calibrated and can provide useful information to forecasters.