An Long Short-Term Memory Model with Multi-Scale Context Fusion and Attention for Radar Echo Extrapolation

Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting is critical for areas such as agriculture, water resource management, urban drainage systems, transport and disaster preparedness. In recent years, methods such as convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNN) in deep learning techniques have been used to solve this task. Despite the effective improvement in forecasting quality, there are still problems with blurred and distorted prediction images, as well as difficulties in effectively forecasting high echo regions. To solve the above problems, this article presents a spatio-temporal long–short-term memory network model in view of multi-scale context fusion and attention mechanisms. This method fully extracts the short-term context information of different scales of radar image through the multi-scale context fusion module. The attention module broadens the time perception domain of the prediction unit so that the model perceives more historical time dynamics. Using the Hong Kong region weather radar data as a sample, the results of the experimental comparative analysis show that the spatio-temporal long and short-term memory network in view of multi-scale context fusion and attention mechanism achieves better prediction performance. Our model is effective in improving both image quality and meteorological assessment metrics with higher accuracy and more details.