Global Cyclone and Anticyclone Detection Model Based on Remotely Sensed Wind Field and Deep Learning

Ming Xie, Ying Li, Kai Cao

Remote Sensing · 23 September 2020

In one sentence. A Faster R-CNN detects global cyclones and anticyclones from ASCAT scatterometer wind fields, reducing false alarms and tracking Hurricane Irma.

Abstract

Cyclone detection is a classical topic and researchers have developed various methods of cyclone detection based on sea-level pressure, cloud image, wind field, etc. In this article, a deep-learning algorithm is incorporated with modern remote-sensing technology and forms a global-scale cyclone/anticyclone detection model. Instead of using optical images, wind field data obtained from Mean Wind Field-Advanced Scatterometer (MWF-ASCAT) is utilized as the dataset for model training and testing. The wind field vectors are reconstructed and fed to the deep-learning model, which is built based on a faster-region with convolutional neural network (faster-RCNN). The model consists of three modules: a series of convolutional and pooling layers as the feature extractor, a region proposal network that searches for the potential areas of cyclone/anticyclone within the dataset, and the classifier that classifies the proposed region as cyclone or anticyclone through a fully-connected neural network. Compared with existing methods of cyclone detection, the test results indicate that this model based on deep learning is able to reduce the number of false alarms, and at the same time, maintain high accuracy in cyclone detection. An application of this method is presented in the article. By processing temporally continuous data of wind field, the model is able to track the path of Hurricane Irma in September, 2017. The advantages and limitations of the model are also discussed in the article.

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