Developing Data-driven Transfer Learning Model to Locate Tropical Cyclone Centers on Satellite Infrared Imagery

Abstract In this paper, a data-driven transfer learning (TL) model for locating tropical cyclone (TC) centers from satellite infrared images in the Northwest Pacific is developed. A total of 2450 satellite infrared TC images derived from 97 TC between 2015 and 2018 were used for this paper. The TC center location model (ResNet-TCL) with added residual fully-connected modules is built for the TC center location. The MAE of the ResNet-TCL model is 34.8 km. Then TL is used to improve the model performance, including obtaining a pre-trained model based on the ImageNet dataset, transferring the pre-trained model parameters to the ResNet-TCL model, and using TC satellite infrared imagery to fine-train the ResNet-TCL model. The results show that the TL-based model improves the location accuracy by 14.1% (29.3 km) over the No-TL model. The model performance increases logarithmically with the amount of training data. When the training data are large, the benefit of increasing the training samples is smaller than the benefit of using TL. The comparison of model results with the Best Track data of TCs shows that the MAEs of TCs center is 29.3 km for all samples and less than 20 km for H2-H5 TCs. In addition, the visualization of the TL-based TC center location model shows that the TL model can accurately extract the most important features related to TC center location, including TC eye, TC texture, and contour. On the other hand, the No-TL model does not accurately extract these features.