Modeling and forecasting relative humidity using multilayer perceptron, radial basis function, and linear regression approaches

Forecasting relative humidity is a critical for addressing the challenges of climate change. It facilitates comprehension of climatic mechanisms and the anticipation of extreme weather events, while also contributing to strengthening societal resilience and protection. Indeed, elevated levels of humidity have been demonstrated to exacerbate heat waves, leading to a marked increase in both the perceived temperature and the associated health risks. Conversely, low humidity promotes conditions conducive to droughts and wildfires. Moreover, relative humidity plays a key role in the water cycle, influencing precipitation, evaporation, and cloud formation. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for anticipating floods, droughts, and water shortages. In this study, mathematical models were developed to predict relative humidity in the Fez, Morocco, using multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks, radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, and multiple linear regression (MLR). The dataset used in this study includes daily values of eight meteorological parameters, including temperature at 2m, shortwave Radiation, diffuse shortwave radiation, precipitation total, evapotranspiration, vapor pressure deficit and wind speed and relative humidity as the output. The data spans 38 years, from January 1985 to December 2022, and includes 13879 observation days.. To evaluate the predictive performance of these models, we analyzed their architectures, learning algorithms, correlation coefficients, and mean squared errors. The results indicate that the MLP model attains the highest predictive accuracy, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9809 and a mean squared error MSE of 0.0099, outperforming the RBF model (correlation of 0.9603) and the MLR model (correlation of 0.9023), the best performing model used a Tansig activation function in the hidden layer, a Purelin function in the output layer and the Levenberg-Marquardt learning algorithm with a MLP configuration [7-15-1]. The findings of this study offer a valuable contribution to the field of water resource management in the region. They demonstrate the efficacy of artificial neural network models in enhancing moisture forecasting, thereby providing a solid foundation for future research in climate modelling.

---

Opracowanie rekordu ze środków MNiSW, umowa nr POPUL/SP/0154/2024/02 w ramach programu "Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki II" - moduł: Popularyzacja nauki (2025).