A Novel Deep Learning Model by BiGRU with Attention Mechanism for Tropical Cyclone Track Prediction in the Northwest Pacific

Tropical cyclones are among the most powerful and destructive meteorological systems on Earth. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model for tropical cyclone track prediction method. Specifically, the track task is regarded as a time series predicting challenge, and then a deep learning framework by a bidirectional gate recurrent unit network (BiGRU) with attention mechanism is developed for track prediction. This proposed model can excavate the effective information of the historical track in a deeper and more accurate way. Data experiments are conducted on tropical cyclone best-track data provided by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) from 1988 to 2017 in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. Results show that our model performs well for tracks of 6, 12, 24, 48, and 72 h in the future. The prediction results show that our proposed combined model is superior to state-of-the-art deep learning models, including a recurrent neural network (RNN), long short-term memory neural network (LSTM), gate recurrent unit network (GRU), and BiGRU without the use of attention mechanism. In comparison with the methods used by the China Meteorological Administration, Japan Meteorological Agency, and the JTWC, our method has obvious advantages in the mid- to long-term track forecasting, especially in the next 72 h.