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arXiv · 2012.09670

RainBench: Towards Global Precipitation Forecasting from Satellite Imagery

Christian Schroeder de Witt·Catherine Tong·Valentina Zantedeschi·Daniele De Martini·Freddie Kalaitzis·Matthew Chantry·Duncan Watson-Parris·Piotr Bilinski
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Abstract

Extreme precipitation events, such as violent rainfall and hail storms, routinely ravage economies and livelihoods around the developing world. Climate change further aggravates this issue. Data-driven deep learning approaches could widen the access to accurate multi-day forecasts, to mitigate against such events. However, there is currently no benchmark dataset dedicated to the study of global precipitation forecasts. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{RainBench}, a new multi-modal benchmark dataset for data-driven precipitation forecasting. It includes simulated satellite data, a selection of relevant meteorological data from the ERA5 reanalysis product, and IMERG precipitation data. We also release \textbf{PyRain}, a library to process large precipitation datasets efficiently. We present an extensive analysis of our novel dataset and establish baseline results for two benchmark medium-range precipitation forecasting tasks. Finally, we discuss existing data-driven weather forecasting methodologies and suggest future research avenues.

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Christian Schroeder de Witt, Catherine Tong, Valentina Zantedeschi, Daniele De Martini, Freddie Kalaitzis, Matthew Chantry, Duncan Watson-Parris, Piotr Bilinski. 2020-12-17. RainBench: Towards Global Precipitation Forecasting from Satellite Imagery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09670

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