Weather variations play a significant role in peoples’ short-term, medium-term or long-term planning. Therefore, understanding of weather patterns has become very important in decision making. Short-term weather forecasting (nowcasting) involves the prediction of weather over a short period of time; typically few hours. Different techniques have been proposed for short-term weather forecasting. Traditional techniques used for nowcasting are highly parametric, and hence complex. Recently, there has been a shift towards the use of artificial intelligence techniques for weather nowcasting. These include the use of machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks. In this chapter, we report the use of deep learning techniques for weather nowcasting. Deep learning techniques were tested on meteorological data. Three deep learning techniques, namely multilayer perceptron, Elman recurrent neural networks and Jordan recurrent neural networks, were used in this work. Multilayer perceptron models achieved 91 and 75% accuracies for sunshine forecasting and precipitation forecasting respectively, Elman recurrent neural network models achieved accuracies of 96 and 97% for sunshine and precipitation forecasting respectively, while Jordan recurrent neural network models achieved accuracies of 97 and 97% for sunshine and precipitation nowcasting respectively. The results obtained underline the utility of using deep learning for weather nowcasting.
Demand Modelling in Telecommunications
