Improving the spatial accuracy of extreme tropical cyclone rainfall in ERA5 using deep learning (Papers Track)
Guido Ascenso (Politecnico di Milano); Andrea Ficchì (Politecnico di Milano); Matteo Giuliani (Politecnico di Milano); Leone Cavicchia (Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC)); Enrico Scoccimarro (Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC)); Andrea Castelletti (Politecnico di Milano)
Abstract
We propose a novel method for the bias adjustment and post-processing of gridded rainfall data products. Our method uses U-Net (a deep convolutional neural network) as a backbone, and a novel loss function given by the combination of a pixelwise bias component (Mean Absolute Error) and a spatial accuracy component (Fractions Skill Score). We evaluate the proposed approach by adjusting extreme rainfall from the popular ERA5 reanalysis dataset, using the multi-source observational dataset MSWEP as a target. We focus on a sample of extreme rainfall events induced by tropical cyclones and show that the proposed method significantly reduces both the MAE (by 16\%) and FSS (by 53\%) of ERA5.