Forecasting of monthly relative humidity in Delhi, India, using SARIMA and ANN models

Relative humidity plays an important role in climate change and global warming, making it a research area of greater concern in recent decades. The present study attempted to implement seasonal autoregressive moving average (SARIMA) and artificial neural network (ANN) with multilayer perceptron (MLP) models to forecast the monthly relative humidity in Delhi, India during 2017–2025. The average monthly relative humidity data for the period 2000–2016 have been used to carry out the objectives of the proposed study. The forecast trend in relative humidity declines from 2017 to 2025. The accuracy of the models has been measured using root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). The results showed that the SARIMA model provides the forecasted relative humidity with RMSE of 6.04 and MAE of 4.56. On the other hand, MLP model reported the forecasted relative humidity with RMSE of 4.65 and MAE of 3.42. This study concluded that the ANN model was more reliable for predicting relative humidity than SARIMA model. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40808-022-01385-8.