Simple Baseline for Weather Forecasting Using Spatiotemporal Context Aggregation Network

Traditional weather forecasting relies on domain expertise and computationally intensive numerical simulation systems. Recently, with the development of a data-driven approach, weather forecasting based on deep learning has been receiving attention. Deep learning-based weather forecasting has made stunning progress, from various backbone studies using CNN, RNN, and Transformer to training strategies using weather observations datasets with auxiliary inputs. All of this progress has contributed to the field of weather forecasting; however, many elements and complex structures of deep learning models prevent us from reaching physical interpretations. This paper proposes a SImple baseline with a spatiotemporal context Aggregation Network (SIANet) that achieved state-of-the-art in 4 parts of 5 benchmarks of W4C22. This simple but efficient structure uses only satellite images and CNNs in an end-to-end fashion without using a multi-model ensemble or fine-tuning. This simplicity of SIANet can be used as a solid baseline that can be easily applied in weather forecasting using deep learning.

Domain Generalization Strategy to Train Classifiers Robust to Spatial-Temporal Shift

Deep learning-based weather prediction models have advanced significantly in recent years. However, data-driven models based on deep learning are difficult to apply to real-world applications because they are vulnerable to spatial-temporal shifts. A weather prediction task is especially susceptible to spatial-temporal shifts when the model is overfitted to locality and seasonality. In this paper, we propose a training strategy to make the weather prediction model robust to spatial-temporal shifts. We first analyze the effect of hyperparameters and augmentations of the existing training strategy on the spatial-temporal shift robustness of the model. Next, we propose an optimal combination of hyperparameters and augmentation based on the analysis results and a test-time augmentation. We performed all experiments on the W4C22 Transfer dataset and achieved the 1st performance.