Using machine learning to identify the occurrence of changing air masses

In the forecast data post-processing at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) a regular Kalman filter is used to debias the two meter air temperature forecast of the physical models by controlling towards air temperature observations. The Kalman filter however diverges when encountering greater nonlinearities in shifting weather patterns, and can only be manually reset when a new air mass has stabilized itself within its operating region. This project aimed to automate this process by means of a machine learning approach. The methodology was at its base supervised learning, by first algorithmically labelling the air mass shift occurrences in the data, followed by training a logistic regression model. Observational data from the latest twenty years of the Uppsala automatic meteorological station was used for the analysis. A simple pipeline for loading, labelling, training on and visualizing the data was built. As a work in progress the operating regime was more of a semi-supervised one - which also in the long run could be a necessary and fruitful strategy. Conclusively the logistic regression appeared to be quite able to handle and infer from the dynamics of air temperatures - albeit non-robustly tested - being able to correctly classify 77% of the labelled data. This work was presented at Uppsala University in June 1st of 2018, and later in June 20th at SMHI.