With the rapid development of deep learning,its automatic learning characteristics and accurate prediction ability make it successful in ground-based cloud classification.More complex and better deep learning networks are applied and studied in the field of ground-based cloud classification.In the past two years,some large-scale ground-based cloud classification data sets have been published,yet there is no literature on fully introduction and use of these large data sets.Here,we list the lately issued massive data sets,then introduce the cloud classification technology,especially detail the latest research progress in deep learning-based cloud classification,and finally assess and compare several classic convolution neural network learning models on their ground-based cloud classification performance.The convolution neural network is verified to be effective in the field of ground-based cloud classification.