METEO-DLNet: Quantitative Precipitation Nowcasting Net Based on Meteorological Features and Deep Learning

Abstract

Precipitation prediction plays a crucial role in people’s daily lives, work, and social development. Especially in the context of global climate variability, where extreme precipitation causes significant losses to the property of people worldwide, it is urgently necessary to use deep learning algorithms based on radar echo extrapolation for short-term precipitation forecasting. However, there are inadequately addressed issues with radar echo extrapolation methods based on deep learning, particularly when considering the inherent meteorological characteristics of precipitation on spatial and temporal scales. Additionally, traditional forecasting methods face challenges in handling local images that deviate from the overall trend. To address these problems, we propose the METEO-DLNet short-term precipitation prediction network based on meteorological features and deep learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the Meteo-LSTM of METEO-DLNet, utilizing spatial attention and differential attention, adequately learns the influence of meteorological features on spatial and temporal scales. The fusion mechanism, combining self-attention and gating mechanisms, resolves the divergence between local images and the overall trend. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that METEO-DLNet outperforms current mainstream deep learning precipitation prediction models in natural spatiotemporal sequence problems.