ATMConvGRU for Weather Forecasting

Abstract

Weather forecasting, which is challenging due to the complex atmospheric correlation, focuses on providing explicit meteorological estimations as accurate as possible. Recently, techniques based upon convolutional-recurrent networks have shown dramatic performance in domains including radar echo prediction and precipitation forecasting, indicating that deep learning models have great potential in this area. However, existing methods concentrate on adding extra paralleled memory cells to the inner recurrent unit, where the information is mutually independent. To extract spatial–temporal features with stronger correlation, this letter introduced an axial attention memory module with quasi state-in-state cascaded manner. Benefitting from this unit, the spatial–temporal features can be aggregated and embedded into standard ConvGRU formulating Axial aTtention Memory Cascaded ConvGRU (ATMConvGRU) for sequential weather prediction. Experimental results compared with many state-of-the-art methods on four types of weather forecasting related datasets, including temperature, relative humidity, wind, and radar echo, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed ATMConvGRU.