Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Nowcasting

Nowcasting – short-term forecasting using current observations – is a key challenge that human activities have to face on a daily basis. We heavily rely on short-term meteorological predictions in domains such as aviation, agriculture, mobility, and energy production. One of the most important and challenging task for meteorology is the nowcasting of extreme events, whose anticipation is highly needed to mitigate risk in terms of social or economic costs and human safety. The goal of this thesis is to contribute with new machine learning methods to improve the spatio-temporal precision of nowcasting of extreme precipitation events. This work relies on recent advances in deep learning for nowcasting, adding methods targeted at improving nowcasting using ensembles and trained on novel original data resources. Indeed, the new curated multi-year radar scan dataset (TAASRAD19) is introduced that contains more than 350.000 labelled precipitation records over 10 years, to provide a baseline benchmark, and foster reproducibility of machine learning modeling. A TrajGRU model is applied to TAASRAD19, and implemented in an operational prototype. The thesis also introduces a novel method for fast analog search based on manifold learning: the tool leverages the entire dataset history in less than 5 seconds and demonstrates the feasibility of predictive ensembles. In the final part of the thesis, the new deep learning architecture ConvSG based on stacked generalization is presented, introducing novel concepts for deep learning in precipitation nowcasting: ConvSG is specifically designed to improve predictions of extreme precipitation regimes over published methods, and shows a 117% skill improvement on extreme rain regimes over a single member. Moreover, ConvSG shows superior or equal skills compared to Lagrangian Extrapolation models for all rain rates, achieving a 49% average improvement in predictive skill over extrapolation on the higher precipitation regimes.