Improving radar-based rainfall nowcasting by a nearest-neighbour approach – Part 1: Storm characteristics

The nowcast of rainfall storms at fine temporal and spatial resolutions is quite challenging due to the unpredictable nature of rainfall at such scales. Typically, rainfall storms are recognized by weather radar and extrapolated in the future by the Lagrangian persistence. However, storm evolution is much more dynamic and complex than the Lagrangian persistence, leading to short forecast horizons, especially for convective events. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the improvement that past similar storms can introduce to the object-oriented radar-based nowcast. Here we propose a nearest-neighbour approach that measures first the similarity between the “to-be-nowcasted” storm and past observed storms and later uses the behaviour of the past most similar storms to issue either a single nowcast (by averaging the 4 most similar storm responses) or an ensemble nowcast (by considering the 30 most similar storm responses). Three questions are tackled here. (i) What features should be used to describe storms in order to check for similarity? (ii) How should similarity between past storms be measured? (iii) Is this similarity useful for object-oriented nowcast? For this purpose, individual storms from 110 events in the period 2000–2018 recognized within the Hanover Radar Range (R∼115 km2), Germany, are used as a basis for investigation. A “leave-one-event-out” cross-validation is employed to test the nearest-neighbour approach for the prediction of the area, mean intensity, the x and y velocity components, and the total lifetime of the to-be-nowcasted storm for lead times from + 5 min up to + 3 h. Prior to the application, two importance analysis methods (Pearson correlation and partial information correlation) are employed to identify the most important predictors. The results indicate that most of the storms behave similarly, and the knowledge obtained from such similar past storms helps to capture better the storm dissipation and improves the nowcast compared to the Lagrangian persistence, especially for convective events (storms shorter than 3 h) and longer lead times (from 1 to 3 h). The main advantage of the nearest-neighbour approach is seen when applied in a probabilistic way (with the 30 closest neighbours as ensembles) rather than in a deterministic way (averaging the response from the four closest neighbours). The probabilistic approach seems promising, especially for convective storms, and it can be further improved by either increasing the sample size, employing more suitable methods for the predictor identification, or selecting physical predictors

Predicting environmental gradients with fern species composition in Brazilian Amazonia

Conclusions: Fern species composition can be used as an indicator of soil cation concentration, which can be expected to be relevant also for other components of rain forests. Presence-absence data are adequate for this purpose, which makes the collecting of additional data potentially very rapid. Comparison with earlier studies suggests that edaphic preferences of fern species have good transferability across geographical regions within lowland Amazonia. Therefore, species and environmental data sets already available in the Amazon region represent a good starting point for generating better environmental and floristic maps for conservation planning.</p

Fractal and multifractal properties of a family of fractal networks

In this work, we study the fractal and multifractal properties of a family of fractal networks introduced by Gallos {\it et al.} ({\it Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.}, 2007, {\bf 104}: 7746). In this fractal network model, there is a parameter $e$ which is between $0$ and $1$, and allows for tuning the level of fractality in the network. Here we examine the multifractal behavior of these networks, dependence relationship of fractal dimension and the multifractal parameters on the parameter $e$. First, we find that the empirical fractal dimensions of these networks obtained by our program coincide with the theoretical formula given by Song {\it et al.} ( {\it Nat. Phys}, 2006, {\bf 2}: 275). Then from the shape of the $\tau(q)$ and $D(q)$ curves, we find the existence of multifractality in these networks. Last, we find that there exists a linear relationship between the average information dimension $$ and the parameter $e$.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, accepted by J. Stat. Mec

Solar Power Forecasting

Solar energy is a promising environmentally-friendly energy source. Yet its variability affects negatively the large-scale integration into the electricity grid and therefore accurate forecasting of the power generated by PV systems is needed. The objective of this thesis is to explore the possibility of using machine learning methods to accurately predict solar power. We first explored the potential of instance-based methods and proposed two new methods: the data source weighted nearest neighbour (DWkNN) and the extended Pattern Sequence Forecasting (PSF) algorithms. DWkNN uses multiple data sources and considers their importance by learning the best weights based on previous data. PSF1 and PSF2 extended the standard PSF algorithm deal with data from multiple related time series. Then, we proposed two clustering-based methods for PV power prediction: direct and pair patterns. We used clustering to partition the days into groups with similar weather characteristics and then created a separate PV power prediction model for each group. The direct clustering groups the days based on their weather profiles, while the pair patterns consider the weather type transition between two consecutive days. We also investigated ensemble methods and proposed static and dynamic ensembles of neural networks. We first proposed three strategies for creating static ensembles based on random example and feature sampling, as well as four strategies for creating dynamic ensembles by adaptively updating the weights of the ensemble members based on past performance. We then explored the use of meta-learning to further improve the performance of the dynamic ensembles. The methods proposed in this thesis can be used by PV plant and electricity market operators for decision making, improving the utilisation of the generated PV power, planning maintenance and also facilitating the large-scale integration of PV power in the electricity grid

Short-Term Rainfall Prediction Using Supervised Machine Learning

Floods and rain significantly impact the economy of many agricultural countries in the world. Early prediction of rain and floods can dramatically help prevent natural disaster damage. This paper presents a machine learning and data-driven method that can accurately predict short-term rainfall. Various machine learning classification algorithms have been implemented on an Australian weather dataset to train and develop an accurate and reliable model. To choose the best suitable prediction model, diverse machine learning algorithms have been applied for classification as well. Eventually, the performance of the models has been compared based on standard performance measurement metrics. The finding shows that the hist gradient boosting classifier has given the highest accuracy of 91%, with a good F1 value and receiver operating characteristic, the area under the curve score