Spatiotemporal adaptive multiscale transformer for prediction

Spatiotemporal processes, such as floods, rainfall-runoff, and land-use changes, continuously evolve over space and time with high dynamism and complex nonlinearity. Accurate and efficient spatiotemporal process prediction is crucial for understanding their underlying patterns. Recently, deep learning has effectively addressed spatiotemporal prediction issues in Earth science. However, most existing studies address either short-term or long-term dependencies, but ignore the multiscale characteristics and spatial heterogeneity inherent to spatiotemporal processes and critical for practical applicability. This study develops a Spatiotemporal Adaptive Multiscale Transformer (SAMT) model for spatiotemporal process prediction. First, we design an enhanced multiscale spatial heterogeneity module to extract multiscale spatial heterogeneity. Then, we introduce the adaptive scale selection that assigns weights to features at different scales based on their contributions. In addition, we incorporate a spatiotemporal transformer block to simultaneously capture short-term and long-term dependencies. We conduct extensive experiments on three representative spatiotemporal datasets of rainfall, temperature, and flood. Compared to state-of-the-art models, the SAMT model achieves significant improvements across all evaluation metrics. The developed SAMT model critically improves the performance of spatiotemporal process prediction for more accurate and effective modelling of spatiotemporal evolution patterns in the field of Earth sciences.