ML4WX

Local & station forecasting

Visibility and Ceiling Nowcasting Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Aviation Applications

Fabricio Magalhães Cordeiro, Gutemberg Borges França, Francisco Leite de Albuquerque Neto, Ismail Gültepe

Atmosphere · · Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)

PaperPDF

In one sentence. Machine learning regression on ten years of airport station data nowcasts visibility and ceiling height up to 1 h, with MAE of about 324 m and 167 m.

Abstract

This work presents a novel approach for simulating visibility (Vis) and ceiling base height (Hc) in up to 1 h using several machine learning (ML) algorithms. Ten years of meteorological data at 15 min intervals for Santos Dumont airport (SDA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were used in the ML method training and testing process. In the investigation, several categorical and regressive algorithms were trained and tested, and the results were verified with observations. The forecast results reveal that the categorical methods produced satisfactory results only up to 15 min for visibility prediction with the probability of detection greater than 85%. On the other hand, the regressive methods were found to be more capable of generating an accurate prediction of Vis and Hc compared to categorical method up to 60 min. The forecast evaluation metrics for Vis and Hc had correlation coefficients of 0.99 ± 0.00 and 0.96 ± 0.00, with mean absolute errors of 324 ± 77 m, and 167 ± 21 m, respectively. Results suggested that ML methods can improve the prediction of Vis and Hc up to 1 h when accurate observations are used for the analysis.

Labels

Topic
Local & station forecasting, Nowcasting
Type
New model or method
Method
Classical ML (trees, GP, linear, kernels)
Time scale
0–6 h
Domain
Local / station
Data
Station / in-situ
Status
Research
Identifiers
DOI:10.3390/atmos12121657 OpenAlex:W4200019380
Added
2026-10-22

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