DeepRain: ConvLSTM Network for Precipitation Prediction using Multichannel Radar Data

Accurate rainfall forecasting is critical because it has a great impact on people's social and economic activities. Recent trends on various literatures show that Deep Learning (Neural Network) is a promising methodology to tackle many challenging tasks. In this study, we introduce a brand-new data-driven precipitation prediction model called DeepRain. This model predicts the amount of rainfall from weather radar data, which is three-dimensional and four-channel data, using convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM). ConvLSTM is a variant of LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) containing a convolution operation inside the LSTM cell. For the experiment, we used radar reflectivity data for a two-year period whose input is in a time series format in units of 6 min divided into 15 records. The output is the predicted rainfall information for the input data. Experimental results show that two-stacked ConvLSTM reduced RMSE by 23.0% compared to linear regression.