Tropical Cyclone Intensity Estimation Using Himawari-8 Satellite Cloud Products and Deep Learning

This study develops an objective deep-learning-based model for tropical cyclone (TC) intensity estimation. The model’s basic structure is a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is a widely used technology in computer vision tasks. In order to optimize the model’s structure and to improve the feature extraction ability, both residual learning and attention mechanisms are embedded into the model. Five cloud products, including cloud optical thickness, cloud top temperature, cloud top height, cloud effective radius, and cloud type, which are level-2 products from the geostationary satellite Himawari-8, are used as the model training inputs. We sampled the cloud products under the 13 rotational angles of each TC to augment the training dataset. For the independent test data, the model shows improvement, with a relatively low RMSE of 4.06 m/s and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.23 m/s, which are comparable to the results seen in previous studies. Various cloud organization patterns, storm whirling patterns, and TC structures from the feature maps are presented to interpret the model training process. An analysis of the overestimated bias and underestimated bias shows that the model’s performance is highly affected by the initial cloud products. Moreover, several controlled experiments using other deep learning architectures demonstrate that our designed model is conducive to estimating TC intensity, thus providing insight into the forecasting of other TC metrics.