Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning for Radar-Based Precipitation Nowcasting

Based on C-band weather radar and ground precipitation data from the Helan Mountain area in Yinchuan between 2017 to 2020, we evaluated the forecasting performances of 15 mainstream deep learning models used in recent years, including recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. The critical success index (CSI), probability of detection (POD), false alarm rate (FAR), mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), were used to evaluate the forecasting abilities. The results showed that (1) recurrent-free models have significant parameter quantity and computing power advantages, especially the SimVP model. Among the recurrent-based models, PredRNN and PredRNN++ demonstrate good predictive capabilities for changes in echolocation and intensity, PredRNN++ performs better in predicting long sequences (1 h); (2) SimVP uses Inception to extract temporal features, which cannot capture the complex physical changes in radar echo images and fails to extract spatial–temporal correlations and accurately predict heavy rainfall areas effectively. Therefore, we constructed the SimVP-GMA model, replacing the temporal prediction module in SimVP and modifying the spatial encoder part. Compared with SimVP, the MSE and LPIPS indicators were improved by 0.55 and 0.0193, respectively. It can be seen from the forecast images that the forecast details have been significantly improved, especially in the forecasting of heavy rainfall weather.