Searching similar weather maps using convolutional autoencoder and satellite images

A weather forecaster predicts the weather by analyzing current weather map images generated by a satellite. In this analyzing process, the accuracy of the prediction depends highly on the forecaster's experience which is needed to recollect similar weather maps from the past. In an attempt to help forecasters to obtain empirical data and analyze the current weather status, this paper proposes a convolutional autoencoder model to find weather maps from the past that are similar to a current weather map by extracting the latent features of each image. To measure the similarity between each pair of images, metrics including mean squared error and structural similarity were used and case studies for searching similar satellite images were conducted and visualized. The paper also demonstrates that searching similar weather maps can be useful guidance to all forecasters when analyzing and predicting the weather.