A hybrid climate model for rainfall forecasting based on combination of self-organizing map and analog method

Abstract

A hybrid climate model (HCM) is a novel proposed model based on the combination of self-organizing map (SOM) and analog method (AM). The main purpose was to improve the accuracy in rainfall forecasting using HCM. In combination process of HCM, SOM algorithm classifies high dimensional input data to low dimensional of several disjointed clusters in which similar input is grouped. AM searches the future day that has similar property with the day in the past. Consequently, the analog day is mapped to each cluster of SOM to investigate rainfall. In this study, the input data, geopotential height at 850 hPa from the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) are training set data and also the complete rainfall data at 30-meteorological stations from Thai meteorological department (TMD) are observed. To improve capability of rainfall forecasting, three different measures were evaluated. The experimental results showed that the performance of HCM is better than the traditional AM. It is illustrated that the HCM can forecast rainfall proficiently.