TISE-LSTM: A LSTM model for precipitation nowcasting with temporal interactions and spatial extract blocks

Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting has a profound impact on humanity and society, especially in areas with heavy rainfall, playing a central role in alerting against rainstorm disasters. At present, numerous deep learning-based methods have been proposed and proven superior to traditional radar echo extrapolation techniques like the Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Our study introduces a novel precipitation forecasting model named TISE-LSTM, which can use the real image of the past half hour to predict the radar echo image of the next hour. By integrating the TIB and SEB into TISL-LSTM, we can alleviate the inherent issue observed in existing models, which is the decrease in forecast accuracy for high radar echo regions with extended extrapolation time. On both the CIKM23017 and AHEM real radar echo datasets, the performance of TISL-LSTM (including POD, FAR, CSI and HSS) is improved compared to the second-ranked model by 7.53%, 2.32%, 8.93%, 2.6%, and 14.84%, 6.18%, 8.92%, 18.12%, respectively, when the precipitation threshold is set to 40. Moreover, our model obtained an optimal MAE, MSE, SSIM score. Predicted images and the graphs of each metric over extrapolation time both demonstrate that our model accurately forecasts regions with high radar echoes even with a one-hour extrapolation.