Ground radar precipitation estimation with deep learning approaches in meteorological private cloud

Accurate precipitation estimation is significant since it matters to everyone on social and economic activities and is of great importance to monitor and forecast disasters. The traditional method utilizes an exponential relation between radar reflectivity factors and precipitation called Z-R relationship which has a low accuracy in precipitation estimation. With the rapid development of computing power in cloud computing, recent researches show that artificial intelligence is a promising approach, especially deep learning approaches in learning accurate patterns and appear well suited for the task of precipitation estimation, given an ample account of radar data. In this study, we introduce these approaches to the precipitation estimation, proposing two models based on the back propagation neural networks (BPNN) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) respectively, to compare with the traditional method in meteorological service systems. The results of the three approaches show that deep learning algorithms outperform the traditional method with 75.84% and 82.30% lower mean square errors respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed method with CNN achieves a better performance than that with BPNN for its ability to preserve the spatial information by maintaining the interconnection between pixels, which improves 26.75% compared to that with BPNN.