The Challenge of Machine Learning in Space Weather Nowcasting and Forecasting

The numerous recent breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) make imperative to carefully ponder how the scientific community can benefit from a technology that, although not necessarily new, is today living its golden age. This Grand Challenge review paper is focused on the present and future role of machine learning in space weather. The purpose is twofold. On one hand, we will discuss previous works that use ML for space weather forecasting, focusing in particular on the few areas that have seen most activity: the forecasting of geomagnetic indices, of relativistic electrons at geosynchronous orbits, of solar flares occurrence, of coronal mass ejection propagation time, and of solar wind speed. On the other hand, this paper serves as a gentle introduction to the field of machine learning tailored to the space weather community and as a pointer to a number of open challenges that we believe the community should undertake in the next decade. The recurring themes throughout the review are the need to shift our forecasting paradigm to a probabilistic approach focused on the reliable assessment of uncertainties, and the combination of physics-based and machine learning approaches, known as gray-box.Comment: under revie

Wind Power Forecasting Methods Based on Deep Learning: A Survey

Accurate wind power forecasting in wind farm can effectively reduce the enormous impact on grid operation safety when high permeability intermittent power supply is connected to the power grid. Aiming to provide reference strategies for relevant researchers as well as practical applications, this paper attempts to provide the literature investigation and methods analysis of deep learning, enforcement learning and transfer learning in wind speed and wind power forecasting modeling. Usually, wind speed and wind power forecasting around a wind farm requires the calculation of the next moment of the definite state, which is usually achieved based on the state of the atmosphere that encompasses nearby atmospheric pressure, temperature, roughness, and obstacles. As an effective method of high-dimensional feature extraction, deep neural network can theoretically deal with arbitrary nonlinear transformation through proper structural design, such as adding noise to outputs, evolutionary learning used to optimize hidden layer weights, optimize the objective function so as to save information that can improve the output accuracy while filter out the irrelevant or less affected information for forecasting. The establishment of high-precision wind speed and wind power forecasting models is always a challenge due to the randomness, instantaneity and seasonal characteristics

An Unsupervised Deep Learning Approach for Scenario Forecasts

In this paper, we propose a novel scenario forecasts approach which can be applied to a broad range of power system operations (e.g., wind, solar, load) over various forecasts horizons and prediction intervals. This approach is model-free and data-driven, producing a set of scenarios that represent possible future behaviors based only on historical observations and point forecasts. It first applies a newly-developed unsupervised deep learning framework, the generative adversarial networks, to learn the intrinsic patterns in historical renewable generation data. Then by solving an optimization problem, we are able to quickly generate large number of realistic future scenarios. The proposed method has been applied to a wind power generation and forecasting dataset from national renewable energy laboratory. Simulation results indicate our method is able to generate scenarios that capture spatial and temporal correlations. Our code and simulation datasets are freely available online.Comment: Accepted to Power Systems Computation Conference 2018 Code available at https://github.com/chennnnnyize/Scenario-Forecasts-GA

Prediction Using LSTM Networks

Photovoltaic (PV) systems use the sunlight and convert it to electrical power. It is predicted that by 2023, 371,000 PV installations will be embedded in power networks in the UK. This may increase the risk of voltage rise which has adverse impacts on the power network. The balance maintenance is important for high security of the physical electrical systems and the operation economy. Therefore, the prediction of the output of PV systems is of great importance. The output of a PV system highly depends on local environmental conditions. These include sun radiation, temperature, and humidity. In this research, the importance of various weather factors are studied. The weather attributes are subsequently employed for the prediction of the solar panel power generation from a time-series database. LongShort Term Memory networks are employed for obtaining the dependencies between various elements of the weather conditions and the PV energy metrics. Evaluation results indicate the efficiency of the deep networks for energy generation prediction