Digital Typhoon Dataset V3: Benchmarking for Multi-spectral Extension and Analyzing Systematic Bias in Intensity Regression
Authors: Asanobu Kitamoto, Victor Le Louarn, Noelia Falczuk, Ngoc Anh Tong, Anja Veleva
Organizations: National Institute of Informatics, Japan · Typhoon Science and Technology Research Center, Yokohama National University, Japan · University of Artois, France · University of Buenos Aires, Argentina · Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam · RWTH Aachen University, Germany
This paper presents the Digital Typhoon Dataset V3, a new version of the longest typhoon satellite image dataset spanning nearly 50 years, designed to benchmark machine learning models on long-term spatio-temporal data. The latest addition to Dataset V3 is multispectral satellite data, enabling multi-channel models. We investigate data-splitting strategies and present benchmarking results for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Experimental results show that, under the current dataset construction and experimental setting, multi-channel inputs do not clearly outperform single-channel inputs for pressure regression. Among the evaluated model architectures, image types, and spectral channels, ResNet-18, full-resolution images, and Channel 1 generally provide the best single-channel performance for pressure regression. Performance also differs between the WP and AU datasets by regression target, with lower RMSE on WP for pressure regression and on AU for wind regression. These results highlight the importance of considering dataset-specific and task-specific characteristics when interpreting benchmark performance. Additionally, we analyzed systematic bias in intensity regression, which leads to underestimation of intensity for strong typhoons. We tested imbalance-aware weighting strategies, including inverse-density weighting inspired by BalancedMSE, and showed that these approaches are not sufficient to remove the bias. The dataset is publicly available at http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/dataset/ and https://github.com/kitamoto-lab/digital-typhoon/.
Figures & tables
Feature
WP dataset
AU dataset
Temporal coverage
1978-2025
1979-2025
Spatial coverage
100E to 180E in the Northern Hemisphere
90E to 160E in the Southern Hemisphere
Season
January to December
July (the previous year) to June
Best track
Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)
Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), Australia
Table 1: Characteristics of the WP and AU datasets.
Ch.
WP TCs
WP images
AU TCs
AU images
1
1,169
202,986
511
76,211
2
744
142,583
339
58,865
3
744
142,591
339
58,842
4
502
96,611
223
40,238
Table 2: Number of TCs and Images for the WP and AU datasets for V3-2025.R1.
Ch.
Type
Himawari-1/2/3/4
Himawari-5
GOES-9
Himawari-6/7
Himawari-8/9
1
Infrared
10.5-12.5
10.5-11.5 (11.0)
10.2-11.2 (10.7)
10.3-11.3 (10.8)
11.2±0.2
2
Infrared
-
11.5-12.5 (12.0)
11.5-12.4 (11.95)
11.5-12.5 (12.0)
12.35±0.3
3
Water Vapor
-
-
6.5-7.0 (6.75)
6.5-7.0 (6.75)
6.25±0.37
4
Near Infrared
-
-
-
3.5-4.0 (3.75)
3.85±0.22
Table 3: Channel numbers assigned in the dataset and the duration of each channel across the Himawari satellite series.
Figure 1: Overview of the data-processing pipeline.
Ch.
Total images
Train images
Evaluation images (%)
1
202,986
192,956
10,030 ( 4.94% )
2
142,583
132,555
10,028 ( 7.03% )
3
142,591
132,554
10,037 ( 7.04% )
4
96,611
86,551
10,060 ( 10.41% )
Table 4: SS-L2 split (2024–2025) for the WP dataset (V3-2025.R1).
Ch.
Total images
Train images
Evaluation images (%)
1
76,042
70,274
5,768 ( 7.58% )
2
58,865
53,097
5,768 ( 9.80% )
3
58,842
53,074
5,768 ( 9.80% )
4
40,238
34,501
5,737 ( 14.26% )
Table 5: SS-L2 split (2024–2025) for the filtered AU dataset (V3-2025.R1).
Figure 2: Comparison of the convergence behavior of SGD and Adam on WP-1. Curves show the average validation RMSE on the held-out 2024–2025 evaluation set over 5 independent runs, with shaded regions indicating one standard deviation.
Table 6: Experimental settings for benchmarking single-channel models.
Ch.
Model
Full
Resized
Cropped
1
ResNet-18
6.5618 (±0.06)
6.9591 (±0.09)
6.9054 (±0.05)
1
ResNet-50
7.3367 (±1.13)
7.0446 (±0.22)
8.0222 (±2.53)
2
ResNet-18
6.7844 (±0.09)
7.2420 (±0.06)
7.0621 (±0.09)
2
ResNet-50
8.1232 (±1.29)
8.0211 (±0.43)
7.0262 (±0.26)
3
ResNet-18
6.9385 (±0.05)
7.4771 (±0.15)
7.3650 (±0.10)
3
ResNet-50
7.1517 (±0.24)
7.8674 (±0.21)
7.3509 (±0.19)
Table 7: RMSE (hPa) for the pressure regression task for the WP dataset for four channels and three image types.
Ch.
Model
Full
Resized
Cropped
1
ResNet-18
7.2015 (±0.12)
7.6933 (±0.15)
7.3887 (±0.31)
1
ResNet-50
7.3342 (±0.27)
8.2380 (±0.35)
7.5673 (±0.39)
2
ResNet-18
7.2708 (±0.29)
7.8543 (±0.51)
7.2427 (±0.12)
2
ResNet-50
8.5820 (±0.70)
8.1601 (±0.42)
8.2518 (±0.68)
3
ResNet-18
8.5809 (±1.36)
7.9710 (±0.27)
8.7664 (±1.56)
3
ResNet-50
9.5891 (±1.46)
9.0027 (±0.71)
8.4390 (±0.63)
Table 8: The RMSE (hPa) of the pressure regression task for the AU dataset for four channels and three image types.
Ch.
Model
Full
Resized
Cropped
1
ResNet-18
15.7493 (±1.09)
16.9485 (±0.41)
16.1151 (±0.27)
1
ResNet-50
15.9613 (±0.32)
15.9931 (±0.06)
15.8842 (±0.87)
2
ResNet-18
15.6748 (±0.80)
17.0907 (±0.46)
16.0942 (±0.28)
2
ResNet-50
15.9355 (±0.33)
17.1484 (±1.00)
16.1344 (±0.18)
3
ResNet-18
16.0743 (±0.67)
17.4122 (±0.66)
16.3196 (±0.15)
3
ResNet-50
16.1426 (±0.40)
16.8639 (±0.24)
16.4675 (±0.60)
Table 9: RMSE (kt) for the wind regression task for the WP dataset for four channels and three image types.
Ch.
Model
Full
Resized
Cropped
1
ResNet-18
11.4344 (±0.13)
11.6104 (±0.17)
11.5828 (±0.24)
1
ResNet-50
10.7545 (±0.17)
11.9051 (±0.12)
11.0413 (±0.86)
2
ResNet-18
13.2135 (±0.33)
13.4230 (±0.18)
12.6630 (±0.19)
2
ResNet-50
13.6150 (±0.42)
13.7778 (±0.54)
13.7715 (±0.63)
3
ResNet-18
12.9419 (±0.54)
13.2351 (±0.74)
12.7642 (±0.44)
3
ResNet-50
12.5016 (±0.31)
13.1745 (±0.52)
13.1644 (±0.50)
Table 10: RMSE (kt) for the wind regression task for the AU dataset for four channels and three image types.
Input channels
RMSE (hPa)
Single-channel dataset
Channel 1
6.9270 (±0.12)
6.5618 (±0.06)
Channel 2
6.9605 (±0.07)
6.7844 (±0.09)
Channel 3
7.3958 (±0.58)
6.9385 (±0.05)
Channel 4
7.3973 (±0.17)
7.3386 (±0.08)
Channel 1 + 2
6.9265 (±0.11)
-
Channel 1 + 3
7.1512 (±0.24)
-
Table 11: Results of the pressure regression task for the WP dataset, comparing single-channel and multi-channel inputs. Results from the single-channel dataset with the same configuration are taken from Table 7 .
Input channels
RMSE (hPa)
Single-channel dataset
Channel 1
8.2839 (±0.33)
7.2015 (±0.12)
Channel 2
8.2370 (±0.62)
7.2708 (±0.29)
Channel 3
8.4316 (±0.60)
8.5809 (±1.36)
Channel 4
9.7118 (±0.27)
9.7814 (±0.31)
Channel 1 + 2
8.4443 (±0.10)
-
Channel 1 + 3
8.4714 (±0.42)
-
Table 12: Results of the pressure regression task for the AU dataset, comparing single-channel and multi-channel inputs. Results from the single-channel dataset with the same configuration are taken from Table 8 .
Figure 3: Systematic bias (Prediction - True) across seasonal splits for the pressure regression task (WP-1 dataset, ResNet-18, Channel 1, Full images). Gray curves represent individual splits (each corresponding to a consecutive-year pair from 1978–1979 to 2024–2025), while the blue curve shows the mean bias across all 47 overlapping temporal splits. The shaded area represents ±1 standard deviation.
Figure 4: Trade-off between bias reduction for strong typhoons and global RMSE for different weighting schemes for the WP-1 dataset. Results are averaged over five independent training runs using the same fixed training protocol. The red dashed line indicates zero error.
Figure 5: Mean prediction error (Pred - True) for the WP-1 dataset using inverse-density weighting (global RMSE = 8.42). Results are averaged over five independent training runs using the same fixed training protocol. The red dashed line indicates zero error.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Ch.
WP TCs
WP images
AU TCs
AU images
1
1,169
202,986
511
76,188
2
744
142,583
339
58,842
3
744
142,591
339
58,842
4
502
96,611
223
40,238
Appendix
Table 13: Number of TCs and images for the WP and AU datasets for V3-2025.R2. The only differences from Table 2 (V3-2025.R1) are the AU images in Channels 1 and 2, which are 23 fewer because of the removed GOES-9 images (Section 2.5 ); the number of TCs is unchanged.
Evaluation RMSE
Training RMSE
Dataset
Corrupted
Release
Last 10
Last 5
Epoch 50
Epoch 50
WP-1
577 (0.30%)
R1
6.63 ( ± 0.01)
6.61 ( ± 0.05)
6.66 ( ± 0.08)
2.03
R2
6.54 ( ± 0.02)
6.52 ( ± 0.04)
6.51 ( ± 0.05)
1.33
WP-3
1,252 (0.94%)
R1
7.10 ( ± 0.08)
7.09 ( ± 0.09)
7.07 ( ± 0.11)
2.89
R2
6.98 ( ± 0.05)
7.04 ( ± 0.10)
7.05 ( ± 0.23)
1.34
AU-1
39 (0.06%)
R1
7.53 ( ± 0.19)
7.60 ( ± 0.23)
7.72 ( ± 0.37)
1.44
Appendix
Table 14: Comparison of V3-2025.R1 and V3-2025.R2: mean ( ± standard deviation) over five runs. “Corrupted” is the number (fraction) of training observations whose image was corrected in V3-2025.R2; in addition, 23 training images were removed from each of AU-1 and AU-2. None of them are in the evaluation set. “Last 10” and “Last 5” are the medians of the evaluation RMSE over epochs 41–50 and 46–50 of each run. All values are in hPa. A large AU-3 R2 value is due to 2 runs that ended on a spike.