Deepwind: A Heterogeneous Spatio-Temporal Model for Wind Forecasting

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) has shown great potential in enhancing the performance of traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods in weather forecasting. Certain applications such as wind power generation desire more accurate wind predictions, especially in local areas, which is challenging due to limited observations and complex dynamics. To this end, this paper introduces a DL-based heterogeneous model named DeepWind for NWP correction, which can simultaneously correct the NWP of diverse wind variables across multiple weather stations. In particular, it first exerts the meteorological domain knowledge to achieve an effective transformation of target variables and then leverages heterogeneous networks to learn spatio-temporal representations. A novel difference loss function is further designed for stable temporal learning. Moreover, this study might be the first to expose an underlying evaluation problem in deep forecasting, which we call evaluation inconsistency, thereby necessitating the assessment of model performance across diverse evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over strong DL baselines, which makes it positioned for deployment in the real-world production environment.

Keywords: Deep learning, wind forecasting, NWP correction, multi-criteria evaluation