Abstract
Tropical cyclones are severe weather events which have massive human and
economic effect, so it is important to be able to understand how their
location, frequency and structure might change in future climate. Here,
a lightweight Deep Learning model is presented which is intended for
detecting the presence or absence of tropical cyclones in running
numerical simulations. This model has been developed to investigate the
avoidance of saving vast amounts of data for analysis by filtering data
during simulations so as to save only relevant data. Subsequent analysis
workflow can target that data, avoiding the need to save all simulation
outputs for cyclone analysis. The model was trained on ERA-Interim
reanalysis data from 1979 to 2017 and the training concentrated on
delivering the highest possible recall rate (successful detection of
cyclones) while rejecting enough data to make a difference in outputs.
When tested using data from the two subsequent years, the recall rate
was 92% and the precision was 36%. For the desired filtration
application, if the desired target included relevant meteorological
events, the effective precision was 85%. The recall rate compares
favourably with other methods of cyclone identification having the best
Area Under Curve for the Precision/Recall (AUC-PR) and using the
smallest number of parameters for both training and inference.