Developing a regional fog prediction model using tree-based machine-learning techniques and automated visibility observations

While it could become an alternative water resource, fog could undermine traffic safety and operational performance of infrastructures. To reduce such adverse impacts, it is necessary to have spatially continuous fog risk information. In this work, tree-based machine-learning models were developed in order to quantify fog risks with routine meteorological observations alone. The Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), Light Gradient Boosting (LGB), and Random Forests (RF) were chosen for the regional fog models using operational weather and visibility observations within the Jeollabuk-do province. Results showed that RF seemed to show the most robust performance to categorize between fog and non-fog situations during the training and evaluation period of 2017-2019. While the LGB performed better than in predicting fog occurrences than the others, its false alarm ratio was the highest (0.695) among the three models. The predictability of the three models considerably declined when applying them for an independent period of 2020, potentially due to the distinctively enhanced air quality in the year under the global lockdown. Nonetheless, even in 2020, the three models were all able to produce fog risk information consistent with the spatial variation of observed fog occurrences. This work suggests that the tree-based machine learning models could be used as tools to find locations with relatively high fog risks.