Spatio-temporal Data Mining for Climate Data: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Our planet is experiencing simultaneous changes in global population, urbanization, and climate. These changes, along with the rapid growth of climate data and increasing popularity of data mining techniques may lead to the conclusion that the time is ripe for data mining to spur major innovations in climate science. However, climate data bring forth unique challenges that are unfamiliar to the traditional data mining literature, and unless they are addressed, data mining will not have the same powerful impact that it has had on fields such as biology or e-commerce. In this chapter, we refer to spatio-temporal data mining (STDM) as a collection of methods that mine the data’s spatio-temporal context to increase an algorithm’s accuracy, scalability, or interpretability (relative to non-space-time aware algorithms).We highlight some of the singular characteristics and challenges STDM faces within climate data and their applications, and provide the reader with an overview of the advances in STDM and related climate applications. We also demonstrate some of the concepts introduced in the chapter’s earlier sections with a real-world STDM pattern mining application to identify mesoscale ocean eddies from satellite data. The case-study provides the reader with concrete examples of challenges faced when mining climate data and how effectively analyzing the data’s spatio-temporal context may improve existing methods’ accuracy, interpretability, and scalability. We end the chapter with a discussion of notable opportunities for STDM research within climate.