Precipitation nowcasting, which aims to precisely predict the short-term rainfall intensity of a local region, is gaining increasing attention in the artificial intelligence community. Existing deep learning-based algorithms use a single network to process various rainfall intensities together, compromising the predictive accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel recurrent neural network (RNN) based star-bridge network (StarBriNet) for precipitation nowcasting. The novelty of this work lies in the following three aspects. First, the proposed network comprises multiple sub-networks to deal with different rainfall intensities and duration separately, which can significantly improve the model performance. Second, we propose a star-shaped information bridge to enhance the information flow across RNN layers. Third, we introduce a multi-sigmoid loss function to take the precipitation nowcasting criterion into account. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance for precipitation nowcasting over existing algorithms, including the state-of-the-art one, on a natural radar echo dataset.
Precipitation nowcasting using neural networks and ground-based radars has become one of the key components of modern weather prediction services, but it is limited to the regions covered by ground-based radars. Truly global precipitation nowcasting requires fusion of radar and satellite observations. We propose the data fusion pipeline based on computer vision techniques, including novel inpainting algorithm with soft masking.
Precipitation nowcasting is a short-range forecast of rain/snow (up to 2 hours), often displayed on top of the geographical map by the weather service. Modern precipitation nowcasting algorithms rely on the extrapolation of observations by ground-based radars via optical flow techniques or neural network models. Dependent on these radars, typical nowcasting is limited to the regions around their locations. We have developed a method for precipitation nowcasting based on geostationary satellite imagery and incorporated the resulting data into the Yandex.Weather precipitation map (including an a…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Observatory（香港天文台）
The goal of precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity in a local region over a relatively short period of time. Very few previous studies have examined this crucial and challenging weather forecasting problem from the machine learning perspective. In this paper, we formulate precipitation nowcasting as a spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem in which both the input and the prediction target are spatiotemporal sequences. By extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to have convolutional structures in both the input-to-state and state-to-state transitions, we …
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Observatory（香港天文台）
With the goal of making high-resolution forecasts of regional rainfall, precipitation nowcasting has become an important and fundamental technology underlying various public services ranging from rainstorm warnings to flight safety. Recently, the Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) model has been shown to outperform traditional optical flow based methods for precipitation nowcasting, suggesting that deep learning models have a huge potential for solving the problem. However, the convolutional recurrence structure in ConvLSTM-based models is location-invariant while natural motion and transformation …
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Central Weather Bureau（中央气象局）
Precipitation nowcasting is an important task for weather forecasting. Many recent works aim to predict the high rainfall events more accurately with the help of deep learning techniques, but such events are relatively rare. The rarity is often addressed by formulations that re-weight the rare events. Somehow such a formulation carries a side effect of making "blurry" predictions in low rainfall regions and cannot convince meteorologists to trust its practical usability. We fix the trust issue by introducing a discriminator that encourages the prediction model to generate realistic rain-maps w…
Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；SPiesat Information Technology Company Limited（航天宏图信息技术股份有限公司）；Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）
Precipitation nowcasting based on radar echo maps is essential in meteorological research. Recently, Convolutional RNNs based methods dominate this field, but they cannot be solved by parallel computation resulting in longer inference time. FCN based methods adopt a multi-frame-to-single-frame inference (MSI) strategy to avoid this problem. They feedback into the model again to predict the next time step to get multi-frame nowcasting results in the prediction phase, which will lead to the accumulation of prediction errors. In addition, precipitation noise is a crucial factor contributing to hi…
When the Past Matters: FlashBack Memory for Precipitation Nowcasting
College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University（兰州大学大气科学学院）；Fuqua School of Business, Duke University（杜克大学福库商学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）；Supercomputing Center of Lanzhou University（兰州大学超级计算中心）
High-resolution nowcasting is an essential tool needed for effective adaptation to climate change, particularly for extreme weather. As Deep Learning (DL) techniques have shown dramatic promise in many domains, including the geosciences, we present an application of DL to the problem of precipitation nowcasting, i.e., high-resolution (1 km x 1 km) short-term (1 hour) predictions of precipitation. We treat forecasting as an image-to-image translation problem and leverage the power of the ubiquitous UNET convolutional neural network. We find this performs favorably when compared to three commonl…
Accurate and timely estimation of precipitation is critical for issuing hazard warnings (e.g., for flash floods or landslides). Current remotely sensed precipitation products have a few hours of latency, associated with the acquisition and processing of satellite data. By applying a robust nowcasting system to these products, it is (in principle) possible to reduce this latency and improve their applicability, value, and impact. However, the development of such a system is complicated by the chaotic nature of the atmosphere, and the consequent rapid changes that can occur in the structures of …
We propose the use of a stochastic variational frame prediction deep neural network with a learned prior distribution trained on two-dimensional rain radar reflectivity maps for precipitation nowcasting with lead times of up to 2 1/2 hours. We present a comparison to a standard convolutional LSTM network and assess the evolution of the structural similarity index for both methods. Case studies are presented that illustrate that the novel methodology can yield meaningful forecasts without excessive blur for the time horizons of interest.
MambaRain: Multi-Scale Mamba-Attention Framework for 0-3 Hour Precipitation Nowcasting
School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）；Nanjing XinDa Institute of Meteorological Science and Technology（南京新达气象科学与技术研究所）；Beijing Leninainfo Technology Co., Ltd.（北京 Leninainfo 技术有限公司）；China CEC Engineering Corporation（中国 CEC 工程公司）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Tongji University（同济大学数学科学学院）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；College of Meteorology and Oceanography, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学气象学与海洋学学院）；Key Laboratory of Transportation Meteorology of China Meteorological Administration, Nanjing Innovation Institute for Atmospheric Sciences（中国气象局交通运输气象重点实验室，南京大气科学创新研究院）
Deep learning has been successfully applied to precipitation nowcasting. In this work, we propose a pre-training scheme and a new loss function for improving deep-learning-based nowcasting. First, we adapt U-Net, a widely-used deep-learning model, for the two problems of interest here: precipitation nowcasting and precipitation estimation from radar images. We formulate the former as a classification problem with three precipitation intervals and the latter as a regression problem. For these tasks, we propose to pre-train the model to predict radar images in the near future without requiring g…
RNDiff: Rainfall nowcasting with Condition Diffusion Model
Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data（人工智能与大数据学院）；Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学）；Yibin University（宜春大学）；Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学）
PostCast: Generalizable Postprocessing for Precipitation Nowcasting via Unsupervised Blurriness Modeling
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI（金在哲人工智能研究生院）
Recently, many deep-learning techniques have been applied to various weather-related prediction tasks, including precipitation nowcasting (i.e., predicting precipitation levels and locations in the near future). Most existing deep-learning-based approaches for precipitation nowcasting, however, consider only radar and/or satellite images as inputs, and meteorological observations collected from ground weather stations, which are sparsely located, are relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose ASOC, a novel attentive method for effectively exploiting ground-based meteorological observatio…
Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science（智能协同计算实验室，电子科学科技大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Technology (School of Artificial Intelligence), Yibin University（技术（人工智能学院），宜宾大学）；College of Humanities（人文学院）；General Education, Chengdu Textile College（通识教育，成都纺织学院）
Extreme Precipitation Nowcasting using Multi-Task Latent Diffusion Models
School of Computer Science and Technology, Yibin University（宜宾学院计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学人工智能学院）
Precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity over a short period of time, which mainly relies on the prediction of radar echo sequences. Though convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) are widely used to generate radar echo frames, they suffer from inductive bias (i.e., translation invariance and locality) and seriality, respectively. Recently, Transformer-based methods also gain much attention due to the great potential of Transformer structure, whereas short-term dependencies and autoregressive characteristic are ignored. In this paper, we…
Natural disasters caused by heavy rainfall often cost huge loss of life and property. To avoid it, the task of precipitation nowcasting is imminent. To solve the problem, increasingly deep learning methods are proposed to forecast future radar echo images and then the predicted maps have converted the distribution of rainfall. The prevailing spatiotemporal sequence prediction methods apply ConvRNN structure which combines the Convolution and Recurrent neural network. Although improvements based on ConvRNN achieve remarkable success, these methods ignore capturing both local and global spatial …
VMU-Diff: A Coarse-to-fine Multi-source Data Fusion Framework for Precipitation Nowcasting
Department of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化部门）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Transportation Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration（中国气象局交通运输气象重点实验室）
PixelFlowCast: Latent-Free Precipitation Nowcasting via Pixel Mean Flows
Department of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化系）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Do Echo Top Heights Improve Deep Learning Nowcasts?
Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies（智能技术研究所）；Faculty of information Technology（信息技术学院）；Brno University of Technology（布拉格技术大学）；Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing（地质与遥感系）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特技术大学）
