JOHAN: A Joint Online Hurricane Trajectory and Intensity Forecasting Framework

Hurricanes are one of the most catastrophic natural forces with potential to inflict severe damages to properties and loss of human lives from high winds and inland flooding. Accurate long-term forecasting of the trajectory and intensity of advancing hurricanes is therefore crucial to provide timely warnings for civilians and emergency responders to mitigate costly damages and their life-threatening impact. In this paper, we present a novel online learning framework called JOHAN that simultaneously predicts the trajectory and intensity of a hurricane based on outputs produced by an ensemble of dynamic (physical) hurricane models. In addition, JOHAN is designed to generate accurate forecasts of the ordinal-valued hurricane intensity categories to ensure that their severity level can be reliably communicated to the public. The framework also employs exponentially-weighted quantile loss functions to bias the algorithm towards improving its prediction accuracy for high category hurricanes approaching landfall. Experimental results using real-world hurricane data demonstrated the superiority of JOHAN compared to several state-of-the-art learning approaches.