This study applied representation learning algorithms to satellite images and evaluated the learned latent spaces with classifications of various weather events. The algorithms investigated include the classical linear transformation, i.e., principal component analysis (PCA), state-of-the-art deep learning method, i.e., convolutional autoencoder (CAE), and a residual network pre-trained with large image datasets (PT). The experiment results indicated that the latent space learned by CAE consistently showed higher threat scores for all classification tasks. The classifications with PCA yielded high hit rates but also high false-alarm rates. In addition, the PT performed exceptionally well at recognizing tropical cyclones but was inferior in other tasks.

Further experiments suggested that representations learned from higher-resolution datasets are superior in all classification tasks for deep-learning algorithms, i.e., CAE and PT. We also found that smaller latent space sizes had little impact on the classification task’s hit rate. Still, a latent space dimension smaller than 128 caused a significantly higher false-alarm rate.

Though the CAE can learn latent spaces effectively and efficiently, the interpretation of the learned representation lacks direct connections to physical attributions. Therefore, developing a physics-informed version of CAE can be a promising outlook for the current work.