Simple Baseline for Weather Forecasting Using Spatiotemporal Context Aggregation Network

Abstract: Traditional weather forecasting relies on domain expertise and computationally intensive numerical simulation systems. Recently, with the development of a data-driven approach, weather forecasting based on deep learning has been receiving attention. Deep learning-based weather forecasting has made stunning progress, from various backbone studies using CNN, RNN, and Transformer to training strategies using weather observations datasets with auxiliary inputs. All of this progress has contributed to the field of weather forecasting; however, many elements and complex structures of deep learning models prevent us from reaching physical interpretations. This paper proposes a SImple baseline with a spatiotemporal context Aggregation Network (SIANet) that achieved state-of-the-art in 4 parts of 5 benchmarks of W4C22. This simple but efficient structure uses only satellite images and CNNs in an end-to-end fashion without using a multi-model ensemble or fine-tuning. This simplicity of SIANet can be used as a solid baseline that can be easily applied in weather forecasting using deep learning.