AM-ConvGRU: a spatio-temporal model for typhoon path prediction

Typhoons are one of the most destructive types of disasters. Several statistical models have been designed to predict their paths to reduce damage, casualties, and economic loss. To further increase prediction accuracy, two key challenges are (1) to extract better nonlinear 3D features of typhoons, which is hard due to their complex high-dimensional properties, and (2) to combine suitable 2D and 3D features in a proper way to improve predictions. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel spatio-temporal deep learning model named Attention-based Multi ConvGRU (AM-ConvGRU). To automatically select high response isobaric planes of typhoons when considering their whole 3D structures, AM-ConvGRU leverages the Residual Channel Attention Block (RCAB). Furthermore, it integrates a novel model named Multi-ConvGRU to extract large-scale nonlinear spatial features of typhoons. Moreover, the approach relies on a Wide & Deep framework to fuse the traditional Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with the proposed AM-ConvGRU model. To evaluate the designed approach, extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world typhoons data from the Western North Pacific (WNP) basin obtained from both the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) dataset and the EAR-Interim dataset maintained by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning typhoon prediction methods. The source code is available on GitHub with the following link:https://github.com/xuguangning1218/Typhoon_Path.