Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Data Using Deep Neural Network

This research develops a precipitation estimation system from remote sensed data using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Compared to ground-based precipitation measurements, satellite-based precipitation estimation products have advantages of temporal resolution and spatial coverage. Also, the massive amount of satellite data contains various measures related to precipitation formation and development. On the other hand, deep learning algorithms were newly developed in the area of machine learning, which was a breakthrough to deal with large and complex dataset, especially to image data. Here, we attempt to engage deep learning techniques to provide hourly precipitation estimation from satellite information, such as long wave infrared data. The brightness temperature data from infrared data is considered to contain cloud information. Radar stage IV dataset is used as ground measurement for parameter calibration. Stacked denoising auto-encoders (SDAE) is applied here to build a 4-layer neural network with 1000 hidden nodes for each hidden layer. SDAE involves two major steps: (1) greedily pre-training each layer as a denoising auto-encoder using the outputs of previous trained hidden layer output starting from visible layer to initialize parameters; (2) fine-tuning the whole deep neural network with supervised criteria. The results are compared with satellite precipitation product PERSIANN-CCS (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Imagery using an Artificial Neural Network Cloud Classification System). Based on the results, we have several valuable conclusions: By properly training the neural network, it is able to extract useful information for precipitation estimation. For example, it can reduce the mean squared error of the precipitation by 58% for the summer season in the central United States of the validation period. The SDAE method captures the shape of the precipitation from the cloud shape better compared to the CCS product. Design of the loss function is essential to the optimization model where multiple aspects need to be accommodated.