Exploratory Analysis of Deep Learning Models for Forecasting Meteorological Parameters in the Agricultural Sector

Abstract

Accurate meteorological forecasting is essential for agricultural planning, irrigation management, and environmental decision support. This study conducts a comparative evaluation of recurrent and hybrid deep learning architectures for multivariate forecasting of reference evapotranspiration ($ET_0$), vapour pressure deficit (VPD), wind speed, and the sine and cosine components of wind direction. The analysis utilizes 134,376 hourly observations from Ioannina, Greece, spanning January 2011 to April 2026, sourced from ERA5 via the OpenMeteo Historical Weather API. Single and multi-layer GRU and LSTM networks are compared with hybrid 1D-CNN-GRU and 1D-CNN-LSTM models for two forecasting tasks: a 24-hour next-day forecast and a 168-hour week-ahead forecast. Performance is evaluated using normalized root mean squared error, the coefficient of determination, and a composite Weighted Quotient Score (WQS). The most effective purely recurrent models are a 64-unit LSTM for the 24-hour horizon, with a WQS of 0.816755, and a 1024-unit GRU for the 168-hour horizon, with a WQS of 0.779465. The hybrid CNN-GRU models achieved the highest overall scores of 0.827535 and 0.782863 for the 24-hour and 168-hour horizons, but with additionally more number of units respectively to LSTM models, while the CNN-LSTM models yield nearly identical results with substantially fewer parameters. Compared to the corresponding recurrent baselines, the hybrid models improve WQS by 1.22--1.63\% at 24 hours and by 0.44--0.45\% at 168 hours, indicating that convolutional feature extraction is more beneficial for short-term forecasting.