Short range SW monsoon rainfall forecasting over India using neural networks

Abstract

Feedforward Neural Networks are used for daily precipitation forecast using several test stations all over India. The six year European Centre of Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) data is used with the training set consisting of the four year data from 1985-1988 and validation set consisting of the data from 1989-1990. Neural networks are used to develop a concurrent relationship between precipitation and other atmospheric variables. No attempt is made to select optimal variables for this study and the inputs are chosen to be same as the ones obtained earlier at National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in developing a linear regression model. Neural networks are found to yield results which are atleast as good as linear regression and in several cases yield 10 - 20 % improvement. This is encouraging since the variable selection has so far been optimized for linear regression.