Weather forecasting model using Artificial Neural Network

Weather forecasting has become an important field of research in the last few decades. In most of the cases the researcher had attempted to establish a linear relationship between the input weather data and the corresponding target data. But with the discovery of nonlinearity in the nature of weather data, the focus has shifted towards the nonlinear prediction of the weather data. Although, there are many literatures in nonlinear statistics for the weather forecasting, most of them required that the nonlinear model be specified before the estimation is done. But since the weather data is nonlinear and follows a very irregular trend, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has evolved out to be a better technique to bring out the structural relationship between the various entities. The paper examines the applicability of ANN approach by developing effective and reliable nonlinear predictive models for weather analysis also compare and evaluate the performance of the developed models using different transfer functions, hidden layers and neurons to forecast maximum, temperature for 365 days of the year. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of C3IT Keywords-ANN, hidden layer; artificial neurons; MSE; generalization; validation; over-fitting