Toward automated hail disaster weather recognition based on spatio-temporal sequence of radar images

Hail, an intense convective catastrophic weather, is seriously hazardous to people’s lives and properties. This article proposes a multi-step cyclone hail weather recognition model, called long short-term memory (LSTM)-C3D, based on radar images, integrating attention mechanism and network voting optimization characteristics to achieve intelligent recognition and accurate classification of hailstorm weather based on long short-term memory networks. Based on radar echo data in the strong-echo region, LSTM-C3D can selectively fuse the long short-term time feature information of hail meteorological images and effectively focus on the significant features to achieve intelligent recognition of hail disaster weather. The meteorological scans of 11 Doppler weather radars deployed in various regions of the Hunan Province of China are used as the specific experimental and application objects for extensive validation and comparison experiments. The results show that the proposed method can realize the automatic extraction of radar reflectivity image features, and the accuracy of hail identification in the strong-echo region reaches 91.3%. It can also effectively realize the prediction of convective storm movement trends, laying the theoretical foundation for reducing the misjudgment of extreme disaster weather.