Miao, Q.; Pan, B.; Wang, H.; Hsu, K.; Sorooshian, S. Improving Monsoon Precipitation Prediction Using Combined Convolutional and Long Short Term Memory Neural Network. Water2019, 11, 977.
Miao, Q.; Pan, B.; Wang, H.; Hsu, K.; Sorooshian, S. Improving Monsoon Precipitation Prediction Using Combined Convolutional and Long Short Term Memory Neural Network. Water 2019, 11, 977.
Miao, Q.; Pan, B.; Wang, H.; Hsu, K.; Sorooshian, S. Improving Monsoon Precipitation Prediction Using Combined Convolutional and Long Short Term Memory Neural Network. Water2019, 11, 977.
Miao, Q.; Pan, B.; Wang, H.; Hsu, K.; Sorooshian, S. Improving Monsoon Precipitation Prediction Using Combined Convolutional and Long Short Term Memory Neural Network. Water 2019, 11, 977.
Abstract
Precipitation downscaling is widely employed for enhancing the resolution and accuracy of precipitation products from general circulation models (GCMs). In this study, we propose a novel statistical downscaling method to foster GCMs’ precipitation prediction resolution and accuracy for monsoon region. We develop a deep neural network composed of convolution and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent module to estimate precipitation based on well-resolved atmospheric dynamical fields. The proposed model is compared against GCM precipitation product and classical downscaling methods in the Xiangjiang River Basin in South China. Results show considerable improvement compared to the ECMWF-Interim reanalysis precipitation. Also, the model outperforms benchmark downscaling approaches, including 1) quantile mapping, 2) support vector machine, and 3) convolutional neural network. To test the robustness of the model and its applicability in practical forecast, we apply the trained network for precipitation prediction forced by retrospective forecasts from ECMWF model. Compared to ECMWF precipitation forecast, our model makes better use of the resolved dynamical field for more accurate precipitation prediction at lead time from 1 day up to 2 weeks. This superiority decreases along forecast lead time, as GCM’s skill in predicting atmospheric dynamics being diminished by the chaotic effect. At last, we build a distributed hydrological model and force it with different sources of precipitation inputs. Hydrological simulation forced with the neural network precipitation estimation shows significant advantage over simulation forced with the original ERA-Interim precipitation (with NSE value increases from 0.06 to 0.64), and the performance is just slightly worse than the observed precipitation forced simulation (NSE=0.82). This further proves the value of the proposed downscaling method, and suggests its potential for hydrological forecasts.
Keywords
precipitation downscaling; convolutional neural networks; long short term memory networks; hydrological simulation
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
