Using Unsupervised and Supervised Learning and Digital Twin for Deep Convective Ice Storm Classification
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Smart Ice Cloud Sensing (SMICES) is a small-sat concept in which a primary radar intelligently targets ice storms based on information collected by a lookahead radiometer. Critical to the intelligent targeting is accurate identification of storm/cloud types from eight bands of radiance collected by the radiometer. The cloud types of interest are: clear sky, thin cirrus, cirrus, rainy anvil, and convection core. We describe multi-step use of Machine Learning and Digital Twin of the Earth's atmosphere to derive such a classifier. First, a digital twin of Earth's atmosphere called a Weather Research Forecast (WRF) is used generate simulated lookahead radiometer data as well as deeper "science" hidden variables. The datasets simulate a tropical region over the Caribbean and a non-tropical region over the Atlantic coast of the United States. A K-means clustering over the scientific hidden variables was utilized by human experts to generate an automatic labelling of the data - mapping each physical data point to cloud types by scientists informed by mean/centroids of hidden variables of the clusters. Next, classifiers were trained with the inputs of the simulated radiometer data and its corresponding label. The classifiers of a random decision forest (RDF), support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian naïve bayes, feed forward artificial neural network (ANN), and a convolutional neural network (CNN) were trained. Over the tropical dataset, the best performing classifier was able to identify non-storm and storm clouds with over 80 accuracy in each class for a held-out test set. Over the non-tropical dataset, the best performing classifier was able to classify non-storm clouds with over 90 classifiers were shown to be resilient to instrument noise.
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