Rainfall prediction is essential for the enhanced understanding of several issues related to water resources and agriculture, such as flood and drought alerts and flood management. Neural network models are frequently used due to their capability of effectively handling large datasets and addressing the non-stationarity of rainfall data series, resulting in better accuracy and affordable solutions. However, further study is necessary to comprehend the dynamic nature and extreme events of rainfall. Therefore, we implemented a novel wavelet Fourier-enhanced network (W-FENet) that included a Fourier enhancement module (FEMEX) and an improved U-Net mechanism to strengthen the predictive accuracy of daily rainfall. The adopted U-Net structure facilitated efficient multiscale feature extraction and preservation of temporal rainfall information through encoder–decoder connections and residual learning. The results of the developed models for one-day-ahead rainfall prediction were evaluated against two traditional neural network models, i.e., artificial neural networks and long short-term memory networks. Mongla, being a coastal station and having a highly non-linear rainfall pattern, operated by the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, was selected as the study area. Four preprocessing techniques were incorporated to enhance the robustness of the models: empirical mode decomposition (EMD), ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), variational mode decomposition (VMD), and successive variational mode decomposition (SVMD). The SVMD-enhanced W-FENet model (abbreviated as W5) demonstrated significant improvements over existing literature with RMSE = 2.226 mm, MAE = 1.131 mm, PCC = 0.988, NSE = 0.974, and WI = 0.993 at the testing phase.
Ratul et al. (Sat,) studied this question.