LS-NTP: Unifying long- and short-range spatial correlations for near-surface temperature prediction.

The near-surface temperature prediction (NTP) is an important spatial-temporal forecast problem, which can be used to prevent temperature crises. Most of the previous approaches fail to explicitly model the long- and short-range spatial correlations simultaneously, which is critical to making an accurate temperature prediction. In this study, both long- and short-range spatial correlations are captured to fill this gap by a novel convolution operator named Long- and Short-range Convolution (LS-Conv). The proposed LS-Conv operator includes three key components, namely, Node-based Spatial Attention (NSA), Long-range Adaptive Graph Constructor (LAGC), and Long- and Short-range Integrator (LSI). To capture long-range spatial correlations, NSA and LAGC are proposed to evaluate node importance aiming at auto-constructing long-range spatial correlations, which is named as Long-range aware Graph Convolution Network (LR-GCN). After that, the Short-range aware Convolution Neural Network (SR-CNN) accounts for the short-range spatial correlations. Finally, LSI is proposed to capture both long- and short-range spatial correlations by intra-unifying LR-GCN and SR-CNN. Upon the proposed LS-Conv operator, a new model called Long- and Short-range for NPT (LS-NTP) is developed. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. The source code is available on GitHub:https://github.com/xuguangning1218/LS_NTP.