Deep-PHURIE: deep learning based hurricane intensity estimation from infrared satellite imagery

Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural phenomena on Earth. Timely prediction and tracking of hurricane intensity is important as it can help authorities in emergency planning. Several manual, semi and fully automated techniques based on different principles have been developed for hurricane intensity estimation. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network architecture is proposed for fully automated hurricane intensity estimation from satellite infrared (IR) images. The proposed architecture is robust to errors in annotation of the storm center with a smaller root-mean-squared error (RMSE) (8.82 knots) in comparison to the previous state of the art methods. A web server implementation of Deep-PHURIE and its pre-trained neural network model are available at the URL: http://faculty.pieas.edu.pk/fayyaz/software.html#Deep-PHURIE .