High-resolution wind speed forecast system coupling numerical weather prediction and machine learning for agricultural studies — a case study from South Korea

Forecasting wind speed near the surface with high-spatial resolution is beneficial in agricultural management. There is a discrepancy between the wind speed information required for agricultural management and that produced by weather agencies. To improve crop yield and increase farmers’ incomes, wind speed prediction systems must be developed that are customized for agricultural needs. The current study developed a high-resolution wind speed forecast system for agricultural purposes in South Korea. The system produces a wind speed forecast at 3 m aboveground with 100-m spatial resolution across South Korea. Logarithmic wind profile, power law, random forests, support vector regression, and extreme learning machine were tested as candidate methods for the downscaling wind speed data. The wind speed forecast system developed in this study provides good performance, particularly in inland areas. The machine learning–based methods give the better performance than traditional methods for downscaling wind speed data. Overall, the random forests are considered the best downscaling method in this study. Root mean square error and mean absolute error of wind speed prediction for 48 h using random forests are approximately 0.8 m/s and 0.5 m/s, respectively.