Yesterday, the partners of the DeepRain project met at Forschungszentrum Jülich for their Kickoff meeting. Two months into the project, the partners had already exchanged quite a few emails and discussed issues concerning the selection and management of data, the choice of deep learning methods, statistical approaches, and other issues. Some preliminary work has started and everyone was eager to get the project off the ground. The DeepRain team consists of scientists with rather different backgrounds who are all excited to work together in this challenging endeavor. It was difficult to keep the meeting on time, because so many interesting discussions were spun off.
Besides clarifying a number of formal project management issues, some agreements were reached how to approach the next steps. As common test case covering most aspects that need to be addressed during the project, we will focus on the Harz region during autumn. This choice was made, because the Harz represents a region with variable orography, and there are data available from earlier downscaling studies. Also, during autumn, rainfall is primarily driven by large-scale weather phenomena, which makes an easier start for the deep learning networks. Finally, the Harz is well covered by radar data and will allow an analysis of the effects from overlapping radar coverage. Firstly, we will work to establish the necessary data flows and reformatting, thereby making use of the Rasdaman database technology. In parallel, some first test neural networks are designed and decisions concerning the evaluation metrics and methods will be made. The project partners will meet again for a Rasdaman training workshop in Bremen in January 2019. The next project meeting will take place in Osnabrück in March 2019.