Higher-Order Convolutional Neural Networks for Essential Climate Variables Forecasting

Abstract

Earth observation imaging technologies, particularly multispectral sensors, produce extensive high-dimensional data over time, thus offering a wealth of information on global dynamics. These data encapsulate crucial information in essential climate variables, such as varying levels of soil moisture and temperature. However, current cutting-edge machine learning models, including deep learning ones, often overlook the treasure trove of multidimensional data, thus analyzing each variable in isolation and losing critical interconnected information. In our study, we enhance conventional convolutional neural network models, specifically those based on the embedded temporal convolutional network framework, thus transforming them into models that inherently understand and interpret multidimensional correlations and dependencies. This transformation involves recasting the existing problem as a generalized case of N-dimensional observation analysis, which is followed by deriving essential forward and backward pass equations through tensor decompositions and compounded convolutions. Consequently, we adapt integral components of established embedded temporal convolutional network models, like encoder and decoder networks, thus enabling them to process 4D spatial time series data that encompass all essential climate variables concurrently. Through the rigorous exploration of diverse model architectures and an extensive evaluation of their forecasting prowess against top-tier methods, we utilize two new, long-term essential climate variables datasets with monthly intervals extending over four decades. Our empirical scrutiny, particularly focusing on soil temperature data, unveils that the innovative high-dimensional embedded temporal convolutional network model-centric approaches markedly excel in forecasting, thus surpassing their low-dimensional counterparts, even under the most challenging conditions characterized by a notable paucity of training data.