ST-DualNet: A Spatiotemporal Dual-Branch Neural Network Model for Short-Term Precipitation Forecasting

Short-term precipitation forecasting is an important research direction in meteorological studies, holding significant implications for disaster prevention and mitigation, urban flood drainage, and agricultural meteorological management. Existing deep learning models have achieved favourable results in modeling local features, yet they generally suffer from insufficient sensitivity to heavy precipitation areas, limitations in modeling temporal dependencies, and gradient instability issues. To address these limitations, we propose a novel spatiotemporal dual-branch neural network (ST-DualNet) for short-term precipitation forecasting based on radar echo maps. The network comprises a temporal branch (based on an enhanced ST-DConvLSTM) and a spatial branch (based on dilated convolutions and Transformer), respectively capturing the dynamic evolution and spatial structural features of precipitation. The two branches are integrated through the CBAM attention module and 3D convolution layer to achieve cross-branch feature fusion and prediction output. Experimental results demonstrate that ST-DualNet outperforms multiple mainstream models on the KNMI radar precipitation dataset, especially in heavy precipitation forecasting, providing an effective new framework for short-term precipitation forecasting.