An Application of Artificial Neural Network for Wind Speeds and Directions Forecasts in Airports

Wind speed patterns are highly dynamic and non-linear and thus cannot be accurately forecasted using conventional linear regression models. In this work, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique was applied to forecast wind speeds and directions in airports. Monthly data of maximum temperature, minimum temperature, wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity and wind run for Yola International Airport were collected from 1995 to 2021 from Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) Abuja-Nigeria. Six Neural Network models were built. ANN with no hidden layers, ANN model with one hidden layer and two dropout layers, ANN model with four hidden layers and three dropout layers, ANN model with eight hidden layers, ANN model with nine hidden layers and finally, ANN model with ten hidden layers. Back Propagation training algorithm was implemented using the PYTHON toolbox. Each of the models was trained using the training dataset and validated using the validation dataset. To test the forecasting ability of each of the models we tested it using unknown data that is the test dataset. The results from each of the models were organized and assessed in terms of the magnitude of the statistical error between the measured result and the real data. This was achieved by measuring the average of the Mean Square Errors (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for each of the models used for forecasting both wind speeds and directions. The results show that Multilayer perceptron with ten hidden layers with (MSE) = 0.92 and (MAE) = 0.73 emerged as the most preferred model for wind speeds forecast while the multilayer perceptron with four hidden layers with (MSE) = 1,858 and (MAE) = 35 emerged the most preferred model for wind directions forecast. Future research can be carried out to improve the accuracy of the model for wind direction forecasts.