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Deep learning for predicting the monsoon over the homogeneous regions of India

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Abstract

Indian monsoon varies in its nature over the geographical regions. Predicting the rainfall not just at the national level, but at the regional level is an important task. In this article, we used a deep neural network, namely, the stacked autoencoder to automatically identify climatic factors that are capable of predicting the rainfall over the homogeneous regions of India. An ensemble regression tree model is used for monsoon prediction using the identified climatic predictors. The proposed model provides forecast of the monsoon at a long lead time which supports the government to implement appropriate policies for the economic growth of the country. The monsoon of the central, north-east, north-west, and south-peninsular India regions are predicted with errors of 4.1%, 5.1%, 5.5%, and 6.4%, respectively. The identified predictors show high skill in predicting the regional monsoon having high variability. The proposed model is observed to be competitive with the state-of-the-art prediction models.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, for providing all the supports for carrying out the work. We also deeply appreciate the support of Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Finally, we are thankful to our reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

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Correspondence to Moumita Saha.

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Saha, M., Mitra, P. & Nanjundiah, R.S. Deep learning for predicting the monsoon over the homogeneous regions of India. J Earth Syst Sci 126, 54 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-017-0838-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-017-0838-7

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