Center-fixing of tropical cyclones using uncertainty-aware deep learning applied to high-temporal-resolution geostationary satellite imagery

Abstract: Determining the location of a tropical cyclone's (TC) surface circulation center -- "center-fixing" -- is a critical first step in the TC-forecasting process, affecting current/future estimates of track, intensity, and structure. Despite a recent increase in automated center-fixing methods, only one such method (ARCHER-2) is operational, and its best performance is achieved when using microwave or scatterometer data, which are often unavailable. We develop a deep-learning algorithm called GeoCenter; besides a few scalars in the operational Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecasting System, it relies only on geostationary infrared (IR) satellite imagery, which is available for all TC basins at high frequency (10 min) and low latency (< 10 min) during both day and night. GeoCenter ingests an animation (time series) of IR images, including 9 channels at lag times up to 4 hours. The animation is centered at a "first guess" location, offset from the true TC-center location by 48 km on average and sometimes > 100 km; GeoCenter is tasked with correcting this offset. On an independent testing dataset, GeoCenter achieves a mean/median/RMS (root mean square) error of 26.6/22.2/32.4 km for all systems, 24.7/20.8/30.0 km for tropical systems, and 14.6/12.5/17.3 km for category-2--5 hurricanes. These values are similar to ARCHER-2 errors with microwave or scatterometer data, and better than ARCHER-2 errors when only IR data are available. GeoCenter also performs skillful uncertainty quantification, producing a well calibrated ensemble of 150 TC-center locations. Furthermore, all predictors used by GeoCenter are available in real time, which would make GeoCenter easy to implement operationally every 10 min.