Predicting Tropical Thunderstorm Trajectories Using LSTM

Sammanfattning: Thunderstorms are both dangerous as well as important rain-bearing structures for large parts of the world. The prediction of thunderstorm trajectories is however difficult, especially in tropical regions. This is largely due to their smaller size and shorter lifespan. To overcome this issue, this thesis investigates how well a neural network composed of long short-term memory (LSTM) units can predict the trajectories of thunderstorms, based on several years of lightning strike data. The data is first clustered, and important features are extracted from it. These are used to predict the mean position of the thunderstorms using an LSTM network. A random search is then carried out to identify optimal parameters for the LSTM model. It is shown that the trajectories predicted by the LSTM are much closer to the true trajectories than what a linear model predicts. This is especially true for predictions of more than 1 hour. Scores commonly used to measure forecast accuracy are applied to compare the LSTM and linear model. It is found that the LSTM significantly improves forecast accuracy compared to the linear model.