A Novel Tropical Cyclone Track Forecast Model Based on Attention Mechanism

Tropical cyclones are one of the most powerful and destructive weather systems on Earth. Accurately forecasting the landing time, location and moving paths of tropical cyclones are of great significance to mitigate the huge disasters it produces. However, with the continuous accumulation of meteorological monitoring data and the application of multi-source data, traditional tropical cyclone track forecasting methods face many challenges in forecasting accuracy. Recently, deep learning methods have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal features from massive datasets. In this paper, we propose a new spatiotemporal deep learning model for tropical cyclone track forecasting, which adopts spatial location and multiple meteorological factors to forecast the tracks of tropical cyclones. The model proposes a multi-layer ConvGRU to extract the nonlinear spatial features of tropical cyclones, while Spatial and Channel Attention Mechanism (CBAM) is adopted to overcome the large-scale problem of high response isobaric surface affecting the tropical cyclones. Meanwhile, this model utilizes a Deep and Cross framework to combine the traditional CNN model with the multi-ConvGRU model. Experiments were conducted on the China Meteorological Administration Tropical Cyclone Best Track Dataset (CMA) from 2000 to 2020, and the EAR-Interim dataset provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The experimental results show that the proposed model is superior to the deep learning tropical cyclone forecasting methods.