PREDICTING TROPICAL CYCLONE INTENSITY FROM GEOSYNCHRONOUS SATELLITE IMAGES USING DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

Tropical cyclones are among the most devastating natural disasters for human beings and the natural and manmade assets near to Atlantic basin. Estimating the current and future intensity of these powerful storms is crucial to protect life and property. Many methods and models exist for predicting the evolution of Atlantic basin cyclones, including numerical weather prediction models that simulate the dynamics of the atmosphere which require accurate measurements of the current state of the atmosphere (NHC, 2019). Often these models fail to capture dangerous aspects of storm evolution, such as rapid intensification (RI), in which a storm undergoes a steep increase in intensity over a short time. To improve prediction of these events, scientists have turned to statistical models to predict current and future intensity using readily collected satellite image data (Pradhan, 2018). However, even the current-intensity prediction models have shown limited success in generalizing to unseen data, a result we confirm in this study. Therefore, building models for the estimating the current and future intensity of hurricanes is valuable and challenging.
In this study we focus on to estimating cyclone intensity using Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite images. These images represent five spectral bands covering the visible and infrared spectrum. We have built and compared various types of deep neural models, including convolutional networks based on long short term memory models and convolutional regression models that have been trained to predict the intensity, as measured by maximum sustained wind speed.