Intra-city Scale Graph Neural Networks Enhance Short-term Air Temperature Forecasting

Wang, Han; Tang, Jianheng; Zhang, Jize; Yang, Jiachuan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3429

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https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3429

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25 Aug 2025

| 25 Aug 2025

Status: this preprint is open for discussion and under review for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP).

Intra-city Scale Graph Neural Networks Enhance Short-term Air Temperature Forecasting

Han Wang, Jianheng Tang, Jize Zhang, and Jiachuan Yang

Abstract. Air temperature (T_a) has critical implications for various socioeconomic sectors, yet its dynamics are particularly complex in urban areas due to heterogeneous built environments, landscapes, and diverse anthropogenic activities. Physics-based models struggle with intra-city T_a forecasts due to inadequate urban representation and limited spatial resolution. While weather observation networks offer promising alternatives for direct local T_a modeling, an effective framework to leverage these intra-city data remains lacking. Here, we demonstrate that graph neural networks (GNNs) can harness observation network information to refine T_a prediction at individual locations and elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our novel Mix-n-Scale framework with GNNs achieves over 12 % improvement in short-term T_a forecasts compared to conventional time-series approaches. Further model evaluation disentangles performance variations with local T_a variability in diverse spatiotemporal contexts, indicating distinct patterns of intra-city heterogeneity across seasonal and diurnal scales. Our findings establish graph-based approaches for leveraging proliferating urban sensor data and advancing understanding of T_a spatiotemporal dynamics in complex urban environments.

Received: 16 Jul 2025 – Discussion started: 25 Aug 2025

Competing interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest relevant to this study.

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Han Wang, Jianheng Tang, Jize Zhang, and Jiachuan Yang

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RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2025-3429', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Sep 2025 reply
This study introduces a novel Mix-n-Scale framework with GNNs for short-term air temperature (Ta) forecasting at the intra-city scale. The authors convincingly demonstrate that incorporating spatial interactions improves forecast skill, achieving more than a 12 % reduction in RMSE compared with a conventional LSTM-only baseline. They provide a thorough evaluation of model performance and present well-structured analyses. Overall, this is a solid paper and is a meaningful contribution with clear potential to advance short-term forecasting in urban areas. However, there are several areas where additional experiment and discussion would strengthen the manuscript. I would support publication after minor revisions.
Major comments:
The authors show that adding GNN-based spatial aggregation improves performance, but it is unclear how much of the gain depends on the number, proximity, and connectivity of stations. I suggest including the following analyses to provide deeper insight into the value of spatial information for Ta forecasting and to offer practical guidance for applying the framework in settings with sparser or differently configured station networks.
Conduct a sensitivity analysis by removing stations one by one and evaluate how forecast performance changes. For example, I would like to know the effectiveness of inclusion of station 2 on station 3 given their distance. This would also help justify the assumption that “clear directed relationships for information propagation from specific ‘super-nodes’ may not exist” (Lines 236–237).

Verify whether the observed performance gains arise from the GNN’s relational structure rather than simply having access to neighbor data. Consider comparing with a simpler baseline where neighbor embeddings are concatenated or averaged and fed directly to the final prediction layer without using GNN.

Discuss why including global predictors appears to worsen GSAGE performance (Fig. S1) and explain the rationale for keeping them.

Since the manuscript discusses drawbacks of reanalysis-trained DL models (Lines 49 – 51), please add a brief benchmarking context (e.g., a small literature table or paragraph) showing how your error metrics compare with these approaches.

The ensemble approach is a key novelty and clearly improves performance over any single model. It would be helpful to know how sensitive the results are to the ensemble size or to variations in the hyperparameters, as well as how computational resources scale with ensemble complexity to inform an optimized training strategy. What are the best-performing topologies of the GNN and how different are they from each other?

The explanation of the spatiotemporal pattern of forecast performance in Section 3.4 could be clearer. While the authors report RMSEs, local Ta variability, and site characteristics, they do not clearly connect these characteristics to the observed performance differences. For instance, the statement that “the pronounced diurnal contrast can be primarily attributed to solar radiation-induced perturbations and consequent atmosphere-land interactions, highlighting the inherent challenges in capturing daily peak values” (Lines 323 – 325) notes the difficulty but does not explain why these processes make the peak harder to forecast. I recommend revising this section to make those linkages more explicit.

Minor comments:
Latitude and longitude swapped in Table 1.

Since GAT and GSAGE themselves are GNNs without LSTM encoding, the labels or figure captions could be clarified to avoid misunderstanding. For example, Fig. 1 may read as though you are comparing a standalone GNN with an LSTM, rather than GNNs applied on top of LSTM embeddings.

Line 211: revise “the mean Ta patterns is …” to “the mean Ta patterns are …”.

Line 266: revise “significantly outperform than …” to “significantly outperform the …”.

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Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3429-RC1

Han Wang, Jianheng Tang, Jize Zhang, and Jiachuan Yang

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https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3429-supplement

Han Wang, Jianheng Tang, Jize Zhang, and Jiachuan Yang

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Short summary

Air temperature (T_a) varies substantially within cities, yet physics-based models often struggle to capture this fine-scale variability. We demonstrate that a deep learning graph-based approach—leveraging observational sensor networks—can significantly enhance short-term T_a forecasting by refining local amplitude patterns. Furthermore, we introduce an automated framework to streamline graph construction. This study also demonstrates the distinct spatiotemporal dynamics of intra-city T_apatterns.


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