Monthly climate prediction using deep convolutional neural network and long short-term memory

Climate change affects plant growth, food production, ecosystems, sustainable socio-economic development, and human health. The different artificial intelligence models are proposed to simulate climate parameters of Jinan city in China, include artificial neural network (ANN), recurrent NN (RNN), long short-term memory neural network (LSTM), deep convolutional NN (CNN), and CNN-LSTM. These models are used to forecast six climatic factors on a monthly ahead. The climate data for 72 years (1 January 1951–31 December 2022) used in this study include monthly average atmospheric temperature, extreme minimum atmospheric temperature, extreme maximum atmospheric temperature, precipitation, average relative humidity, and sunlight hours. The time series of 12 month delayed data are used as input signals to the models. The efficiency of the proposed models are examined utilizing diverse evaluation criteria namely mean absolute error, root mean square error (RMSE), and correlation coefficient (R). The modeling result inherits that the proposed hybrid CNN-LSTM model achieves a greater accuracy than other compared models. The hybrid CNN-LSTM model significantly reduces the forecasting error compared to the models for the one month time step ahead. For instance, the RMSE values of the ANN, RNN, LSTM, CNN, and CNN-LSTM models for monthly average atmospheric temperature in the forecasting stage are 2.0669, 1.4416, 1.3482, 0.8015 and 0.6292 °C, respectively. The findings of climate simulations shows the potential of CNN-LSTM models to improve climate forecasting. Climate prediction will contribute to meteorological disaster prevention and reduction, as well as flood control and drought resistance.