TPTNet: A Data-Driven Temperature Prediction Model Based on Turbulent Potential Temperature

A data-driven model for predicting the surface temperature using neural networks was proposed to alleviate the computational burden of numerical weather prediction (NWP). Our model, named TPTNet uses only 2 m temperature measured at the weather stations of the South Korean Peninsula as input to predict the local temperature at finite forecast hours. The turbulent fluctuation component of the temperature was extracted from the station measurements by separating the climatology component accounting for the yearly and daily variations. The effect of station altitude was then compensated by introducing a potential temperature. The resulting turbulent potential temperature (TPT) data at irregularly distributed stations were used as input for predicting the TPT at forecast hours through three trained networks based on convolutional neural network, Swin Transformer, and a graph neural network. By comparing the prediction performance of our network with that of persistence and NWP, we found that our model can make predictions comparable to NWP for up to 12 hr.