Short-Term Spatio-Temporal Forecasting of Air Temperatures Using Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Time series forecasting of meteorological variables, such as the hourly air temperature, has multiple benefits for industry, agriculture, and the environment. Due to the high accuracy required for the associated short-term predictions, traditional methods cannot satisfy the requirements and generally ignore spatial dependencies. This paper proposes a deep Graph Convolutional Long Short Term Memory Neural Networks (GCN-LSTM) technique to tackle the time series prediction problem in air temperature forecasting. In the proposed methodology, temporal and spatial-based imputation approaches have been employed to recover the weather variables missing values. The proposed approach is validated using real weather and spatial data from 37 meteorological stations in Spain. Results indicate that using spatial data for forecasting is more effective than relying on the effects of other meteorological variables on air temperature. In fact, the GCN-LSTM showed superior performance when compared with various state-of-the-art Deep Learning based models found in the literature, resulting in a more robust and computationally efficient model for forecasting air temperature in many meteorological stations simultaneously