17749@AAAI

Total: 1

#1 RainBench: Towards Data-Driven Global Precipitation Forecasting from Satellite Imagery [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Christian Schroeder de Witt, Catherine Tong, Valentina Zantedeschi, Daniele De Martini, Alfredo Kalaitzis, Matthew Chantry, Duncan Watson-Parris, Piotr Bilinski

Extreme precipitation events, such as violent rainfall and hail storms, routinely ravage economies and livelihoods around the developing world. Climate change further aggravates this issue. Data-driven deep learning approaches could widen the access to accurate multi-day forecasts, to mitigate against such events. However, there is currently no benchmark dataset dedicated to the study of global precipitation forecasts. In this paper, we introduce RainBench, a new multi-modal benchmark dataset for data-driven precipitation forecasting. It includes simulated satellite data, a selection of relevant meteorological data from the ERA5 reanalysis product, and IMERG precipitation data. We also release PyRain, a library to process large precipitation datasets efficiently. We present an extensive analysis of our novel dataset and establish baseline results for two benchmark medium-range precipitation forecasting tasks. Finally, we discuss existing data-driven weather forecasting methodologies and suggest future research avenues.

Subject: AAAI.2021 - AI for Social Impact