ML4WX

Nowcasting

PPNet : A more effective method of precipitation prediction

Lina Xun, Qiuyan Yao, Fuxin Ji, Teng Li, Jun Zhang, Kaichao Miao, Qing You Yan

Meteorological Applications ·

PaperPDF

In one sentence. Adds FlowNet optical-flow loss to a GAN-based McNet for radar echo extrapolation, improving precipitation nowcasting on Shenzhen radar data.

Abstract

Abstract Precipitation nowcasting plays an important role in the early warning of disasters and many other aspects of people's lives. In this study, we address the problem of radar reflectivity image extrapolation, which has great significance for precipitation near‐range forecasting. In recent years, the related achievements of nowcasting indicate that deep learning‐based methods have been far ahead of traditional ones. However, most deep learning methods focus on spatial appearance but cannot characterize the motion information well. To solve this complex problem, in addition to completing pixel‐level predictions by McNet, we introduce FlowNet and optical flow loss into generative adversarial networks (GAN) to express motion information more effectively. The reflectance image changes significantly due to complex meteorological conditions. Only by adding motion features can the law of change be determined. Thus, we can retain more details in the image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time FlowNet has been combined with GAN to fulfil the task of precipitation prediction. Extensive experiments on the dataset provided by the Shenzhen Meteorological Bureau demonstrate that our network performs favourably against other state‐of‐the‐art methods, which presents great guiding significance for precipitation nowcasting and possesses broad application prospects.

Labels

Topic
Nowcasting
Type
New model or method
Method
GAN or VAE, CNN / U-Net
Time scale
0–6 h
Domain
Regional
Data
Radar
Status
Research
Identifiers
DOI:10.1002/met.2081 OpenAlex:W4283656451
Added
2026-10-22

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