This is the repository for Illinois's Climatehack Team. We earned first place on the leaderboard with a final score of 0.87992.

An overview of our approach can be found here.

Example predictions:

conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate climatehack
python -m ipykernel install --user --name=climatehack

First, download data by running data/download_data.ipynb. Alternatively, you can find preprocessed data files here. Save them into the data folder. We used train.npz and test.npz. They consist of data temporally cropped from 10am to 4pm UK time across the entire dataset. You could also use data_good_sun_2020.npz and data_good_sun_2021.npz, which consist of all samples where the sun elevation is at least 10 degrees. Because these crops produced datasets that could fit in-memory, all our dataloaders work in-memory.

Our best submission earned scores exceeding 0.85 on the Climatehack leaderboard. It is relatively simple and uses the fastai library to pick a base model, optimizer, and learning rate scheduler. After some experimentation, we chose xse_resnext50_deeper. We turned it into a UNET and trained it. More info is in the slides.

To train:

cd best-submission
bash train.sh

To submit, first move the trained model xse_resnext50_deeper.pth into best-submission/submission.

cd best-submission
python doxa_cli.py user login
bash submit.sh

Also, check out best-submission/test_and_visualize.ipynb to test the model and visualize results in a nice animation. This is how we produced the animations found in figs/model_predictions.gif.

We conducted several experiments that showed improvements on a strong baseline. The baseline was OpenClimateFix's skillful nowcasting repo, which itself is a implementation of Deepmind's precipitation forecasting GAN. This baseline is more-or-less copied to experiments/dgmr-original. One important difference is that instead of training the GAN, we just train the generator. This was doing well for us and training the GAN had much slower convergence. This baseline will actually train to a score greater than 0.8 on the Climatehack leaderboard. We didn't have time to properly test these experiments on top of our best model, but we suspect they would improve results. The experiments are summarized below:

The folder experiments/climatehack-submission was used to submit these experiments.

cd experiments/climatehack-submission
python doxa_cli.py user login
bash submit.sh

Use experiments/test_and_visualize.ipynb to test the model and visualize results in a nice animation.