Tropical cyclones have always been a concern of meteorologists, and there are many studies regarding the axisymmetric structures, dynamic mechanisms, and forecasting techniques from the past 100 years. This research demonstrates the ongoing progress as well as the many remaining problems. Machine learning, as a means of artificial intelligence, has been certified by many researchers as being able to provide a new way to solve the bottlenecks of tropical cyclone forecasts, whether using a pure data-driven model or improving numerical models by incorporating machine learning. Through summarizing and analyzing the challenges of tropical cyclone forecasts in recent years and successful cases of machine learning methods in these aspects, this review introduces progress based on machine learning in genesis forecasts, track forecasts, intensity forecasts, extreme weather forecasts associated with tropical cyclones (such as strong winds and rainstorms, and their disastrous impacts), and storm surge forecasts, as well as in improving numerical forecast models. All of these can be regarded as both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is that at present, the potential of machine learning has not been completely exploited, and a large amount of multi-source data have also not been fully utilized to improve the accuracy of tropical cyclone forecasting. The challenge is that the predictable period and stability of tropical cyclone prediction can be difficult to guarantee, because tropical cyclones are different from normal weather phenomena and oceanographic processes and they have complex dynamic mechanisms and are easily influenced by many factors.

Predicting motions of surrounding vehicles is critically important to help autonomous driving systems plan a safe path and avoid collisions. Although recent social pooling based LSTM models have achieved significant performance gains by considering the motion interactions between vehicles close to each other, vehicle trajectory prediction still remains as a challenging research issue due to the dynamic and high-order interactions in the real complex driving scenarios. To this end, we propose a wave superposition inspired social pooling (Wave-pooling for short) method for dynamically aggregating the high-order interactions from both local and global neighbor vehicles. Through modeling each vehicle as a wave with the amplitude and phase, Wave-pooling can more effectively represent the dynamic motion states of vehicles and capture their high-order dynamic interactions by wave superposition. By integrating Wave-pooling, an encoder-decoder based learning framework named WSiP is also proposed. Extensive experiments conducted on two public highway datasets NGSIM and highD verify the effectiveness of WSiP by comparison with current state-of-the-art baselines. More importantly, the result of WSiP is more interpretable as the interaction strength between vehicles can be intuitively reflected by their phase difference. The code of the work is publicly available at https://github.com/Chopin0123/WSiP.

Sea surface temperature (SST) has important practical value in ocean related fields. Numerical prediction is a common method for forecasting SST at present. However, the forecast results produced by the numerical forecast models often deviate from the actual observation data, so it is necessary to correct the bias of the numerical forecast products. In this paper, an SST correction approach based on the Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) network with multiple attention mechanisms is proposed, which considers the spatio-temporal relations in SST data. The proposed model is appropriate for correcting SST numerical forecast products by using satellite remote sensing data. The approach is tested in the region of the South China Sea and reduces the root mean squared error (RMSE) to 0.35 °C. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach is significantly better than existing models, including traditional statistical methods, machine learning based methods, and deep learning methods.

FengYun-4A (FY-4A)’s Geostationary Interferometric Infrared Sounder (GIIRS) is the first hyperspectral infrared sounder on board a geostationary satellite, enabling the collection of infrared detection data with high temporal and spectral resolution. As clouds have complex spectral characteristics, and the retrieval of atmospheric profiles incorporating clouds is a significant problem, it is often necessary to undertake cloud detection before further processing procedures for cloud pixels when infrared hyperspectral data is entered into assimilation system. In this study, we proposed machine-learning-based cloud detection models using two kinds of GIIRS channel observation sets (689 channels and 38 channels) as features. Due to differences in surface cover and meteorological elements between land and sea, we chose logistic regression (lr) model for the land and extremely randomized tree (et) model for the sea respectively. Six hundred and eighty-nine channels models produced slightly higher performance (Heidke skill score (HSS) of 0.780 and false alarm rate (FAR) of 16.6% on land, HSS of 0.945 and FAR of 4.7% at sea) than 38 channels models (HSSof 0.741 and FAR of 17.7% on land, HSS of 0.912 and FAR of 7.1% at sea). By comparing visualized cloud detection results with the Himawari-8 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) cloud images, the proposed method has a good ability to identify clouds under circumstances such as typhoons, snow covered land, and bright broken clouds. In addition, compared with the collocated Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI)-GIIRS cloud detection method, the machine learning cloud detection method has a significant advantage in time cost. This method is not effective for the detection of partially cloudy GIIRS’s field of views, and there are limitations in the scope of spatial application.