A Convolutional Neural Network Model for Predicting the Transport Pathway of Dust Storms

Dust storms are natural disasters that have severely affected human life and the environment. The majority of research in dust storm has been dedicated to the forecasting of storm-prone areas. However, developing models to predict the movement of these storms plays a significant role in the prevention and management of dust storms, because they reveal the transport pathway and identify the next vulnerable areas against the storm. In this research, a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) model has been developed to predict the path of dust storms based on airborne optical depth (AOD) data of MERRA-2 product for the next 12 hours. 40 storm events including 2489 storm hours in a dry region in Central and South Asia have been used for training the model. The results show that the proposed model provides an accurate prediction of the storm's path, so that for the time steps of 3, 6, 9, and 12 hours, the overall accuracy values are 0.9806, 0.9810, 0.9813, and 0.9790, respectively, the F1 score values are 0.8490, 0.8524, 0.8530, and 0.8384, respectively, and the Kappa coefficient values are 0.8387, 0.8424, 0.8431, and 0.8273, respectively.