HSE Researchers Join Forces with Yandex Cloud to Develop a Neural Network for Predicting El Niño
A team of researchers from HSE University, jointly with the Yandex School of Data Analysis and Yandex Cloud, have developed a neural network for anticipating El Niño climate anomalies. The new algorithm enables more precise predictions of changes in the average surface temperature of oceanic waters that can trigger natural disasters in specific regions of the world. At present, the model is capable of predicting El Niño events one and a half years in advance, and the researchers are working towards extending the forecast period to two years.
El Niño refers to a shift in the distribution of surface water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which impacts weather patterns and can potentially trigger natural disasters in certain regions.
El Niño leads to an unusual warming of the equatorial region, and the neural network is capable of simulating the future average temperatures in the Pacific equatorial zone. There is also a reverse process called La Niña, which involves a decrease in oceanic temperatures. The cycle of change between the two processes occurs at intervals of 2 to 7 years. These fluctuations have a significant impact on weather patterns in several countries across the globe and can elevate the risk of wildfires, droughts, floods, and crop failures.
The research team trained the neural network on a set of thousands of temperature maps using synthetic and real data collected from the year 1800 to the present day. Besides conventional machine learning techniques for predicting such phenomena, the ML specialists have been experimenting with the Autoformer architecture during the training process. This approach facilitates high-quality processing of a sequence of temperature maps. To pre-process the datasets, the researchers employed the Yandex DataSphere ML development service, which offers all the necessary tools and dynamically scalable cloud resources for the entire machine learning development cycle.
Dmitry Vetrov
'The challenges of global climate change are becoming increasingly urgent. What's truly alarming isn't just the warming itself, but rather the inevitable imbalance that our planet's climate will undergo. The El Niño effect plays a critical role in causing global weather and climate fluctuations, leading to significant adverse events such as crop failures. Therefore, anticipating El Niño is particularly vital in the current context of escalating climate imbalance,' says Dmitry Vetrov, Research Professor at the Big Data and Information Retrieval School, HSE Faculty of Computer Science, and leading researcher at AIRI.
Anna Lemyakina
'Cloud-based technologies assist us in conducting scientific experiments more efficiently. In projects like El Niño research, quick and flexible access to services for testing various machine learning models is critical. Each test using a new architecture aids in predicting the phenomenon as accurately and early as possible,' explains Anna Lemyakina, Director of National Strategic Projects at Yandex Cloud.
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