Enhancing Short‐Term Wind Speed Prediction Capability of Numerical Weather Prediction Through Machine Learning Methods

Abstract Accurate forecasting of wind speed is essential for daily life and social production. While numerical weather prediction products are widely used, they rely on global data and mathematical models to solve atmospheric dynamics' equations, often failing to capture localized micrometeorological phenomena accurately. Factors such as surface conditions, land‐sea differences, and topography, particularly in coastal areas, further impact the accuracy of wind speed forecasts. This study presents a new method to enhance short‐term wind speed forecasting along China's coast by incorporating local and neighborhood spatiotemporal information. The approach integrates meteorological data from adjacent grid points as new inputs in the LightGBM, CatBoost, and XGBoost algorithms. Stacking ensemble technique is then employed to effectively combine with the aforementioned foundational models. Two sets of experiments are conducted: Experiments 1 exclude surrounding information, while Experiments 2 include it. Each set consists of five experiment groups: annual, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Within each group, four models are tested: XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, and stacking. Results show that incorporating surrounding site information improves forecast accuracy. In all five groups with added surrounding site information, the stacking model performs best. Compared to ECMWF forecast data, the stacking model improves wind speed forecast accuracy from 53.3%, 50.9%, 55.2%, 53.0%, and 54.0% to 77.2%, 73.1%, 76.7%, 78.2%, and 77.1%, respectively. These findings demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the proposed method for improving short‐term wind speed forecasts in China's coastal areas.