A Novel Deep Learning Model by BiGRU with Attention Mechanism for Tropical Cyclone Track Prediction in Northwest Pacific

Tropical cyclones are amongst the most powerful and destructive meteorological systems on earth. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model for tropical cyclone track prediction method. Specifically, the track task is regarded as a time series predicting challenge, and then a deep learning framework by Bi-directional Gate Recurrent Unit network (BiGRU) with attention mechanism is developed for track prediction. This proposed model can excavate the effective information of the historical track in a deeper and more accurate way. Data exepriments are conducted on tropical cyclone best track data provided by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) from 1988 to 2017 in the Northwest Pacific. As results, our model performs well in tracks of 6h, 12h, 24h, 48h and 72h in the future. The prediction results show that our proposed combined model are superior to state-of-the-art deep learning models, include Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory neural network (LSTM), Gate Recurrent Unit network (GRU) and BiGRU without the use of attention mechanism. Compared with China Meteorological Administration (CMA), Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC), our method has obvious advantage in the mid- to long-term track forecasting, especially in the next 72 hours.