The escalating incorporation of wind energy into power grids imposes constraints on the effective operation and control of power systems. Effective short-term wind power forecasting technology is essential for safe power supply and stable operation of the power grid. Thus, a UMAP-IVMD-ILSTM model for wind power forecasting is proposed based on the uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) integrated improved variational mode decomposition (IVMD) and multi-level improved long and short-term memory (LSTM) networks. First, the UMAP approach was utilized to reduce the dimension of related meteorological indicators, and k-means clustering was applied to classify the weather categories after dimension reduction. Subsequently, through the improved variational mode decomposition, the wind power of the adjacent day is decomposed. Moreover, long and short-term memory networks were optimized using the sparrow search algorithm (SSA) as an improved LSTM (ILSTM), and a wind power forecasting model with multi-level LSTM was established for each mode, and the forecasting results of each mode were integrated. Through actual wind farm operation data, it was proven that the method proposed in this study is effective in processing high-dimensional numerical weather prediction (NWP) data. The model can better preserve the information of the original data and reduce the complexity of the original data sequence based on visualization. Compared with the comparative models, the proposed model reduces the RMSE and MAE by up to 18.2% and 21.6% respectively, and has the least running time, which can effectively improve the accuracy and efficiency of wind power prediction.