Machine Learning-Based Weather Classification over Morocco Using Multi-Station METAR Observations

Accurate weather-regime classification is increasingly important for climate-sensitive decision-making in agriculture, aviation, disaster preparedness, and territorial planning, particularly in regions where strong climatic heterogeneity complicates conventional operational workflows. This study proposes a machine learning-based framework for broad-regime weather classification over Morocco using hourly METAR observations collected from 22 meteorological stations between July 2022 and February 2024. The proposed workflow integrates data cleaning, missing-value imputation, feature transformation, categorical encoding, class-imbalance handling, and model optimization under a leakage-safe experimental protocol. To preserve temporal integrity, observations were chronologically split into training, validation, and independent test subsets; SMOTE and random undersampling were applied exclusively to the training subset, whereas the validation and test subsets retained their original class distributions. Seven classifiers were evaluated, including XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine, and Logistic Regression, with hyperparameters optimized using Optuna. The results show that optimized boosting models are particularly effective for Moroccan station-based weather classification. XGBoost achieved the highest test-set accuracy of 95.1%, followed by LightGBM at 94.7% and CatBoost at 93.8%, with optimization improving accuracy by approximately 8–12 percentage points compared with baseline configurations. Because the dataset exhibits class imbalance, macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-score were emphasized alongside accuracy to provide a more reliable assessment across weather classes. Confusion-matrix analysis indicates improved recognition of underrepresented regimes, especially Dust/Sand events, while residual confusion between Fog/Haze and Rain/Storm reflects both physical overlap and the limits of a four-class METAR taxonomy. Overall, the findings demonstrate that optimized ensemble learning can provide a robust, computationally efficient, and operationally relevant classification layer for regional meteorological decision support in Morocco, while future work should extend the framework to longer time series, finer weather taxonomies, and external regional validation.