Fuzzy Case - Based Prediction of Ceiling and Visibility

Operational meteorology involves the application of accumulated human expertise. When developing intelligent systems for operational meteorologists, three aspects of forecasting should be considered, namely: forecasting relies on a variety of techniques; experts convey their knowledge with fuzzy terms; and data are often imprecise. No single artificial intelligence (AI) technique is best for all meteorological applications. When AI methods are hybridized in a system, the system can inherit the strengths of its constituent AI methods. In concept, the process of forecasting can be best described and copied by using an assortment of AI techniques, or by adopting a hybrid-AI approach. Accordingly, a new type of weather forecasting system has been developed, one that combines fuzzy logic (FL) with case-based reasoning (CBR). FL gives us a way to incorporate linguistically expressed relationships into systems. CBR lets us efficiently identify one hundred most analogous and applicable cases out of a library containing over 300,000 cases. A hybrid FL-CBR intelligent system, developed to help predict ceiling and visibility at airports, is described in this paper.