Qifeng Lu

Fu Wang, Qifeng Lu, Xinyu Long et al.

Accurate forecasting of three-dimensional (3D) cloud fields is important for atmospheric analysis and short-range numerical weather prediction, yet it remains challenging because cloud evolution involves cross-layer interactions, nonlocal dependencies, and multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models based on convolutions, recurrence, or attention often rely on locality-biased representations and therefore struggle to preserve fine cloud structures in volumetric forecasting tasks. To address this issue, we propose QENO, a hybrid quantum-inspired spatiotemporal forecasting framework for 3D cloud fields. The proposed architecture consists of four components: a classical spatiotemporal encoder for compact latent representation, a topology-aware quantum enhancement block for modeling nonlocal couplings in latent space, a dynamic fusion temporal unit for integrating measurement-derived quantum features with recurrent memory, and a decoder for reconstructing future cloud volumes. Experiments on CMA-MESO 3D cloud fields show that QENO consistently outperforms representative baselines, including ConvLSTM, PredRNN++, Earthformer, TAU, and SimVP variants, in terms of MSE, MAE, RMSE, SSIM, and threshold-based detection metrics. In particular, QENO achieves an MSE of 0.2038, an RMSE of 0.4514, and an SSIM of 0.6291, while also maintaining a compact parameter budget. These results indicate that topology-aware hybrid quantum-classical feature modeling is a promising direction for 3D cloud structure forecasting and atmospheric Earth observation data analysis.

Honglu Sun, Hao Jing, Zhixiang Dai et al.

A fundamental challenge in numerical weather prediction is to efficiently produce high-resolution forecasts. A common solution is applying downscaling methods, which include dynamical downscaling and statistical downscaling, to the outputs of global models. This work focuses on statistical downscaling, which establishes statistical relationships between low-resolution and high-resolution historical data using statistical models. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for this task, giving rise to various high-performance super-resolution models, which can be directly applied for downscaling, such as diffusion models and Generative Adversarial Networks. This work relies on a diffusion-based downscaling framework named CorrDiff. In contrast to the original work of CorrDiff, the region considered in this work is nearly 40 times larger, and we not only consider surface variables as in the original work, but also encounter high-level variables (six pressure levels) as target downscaling variables. In addition, a global residual connection is added to improve accuracy. In order to generate the 3km forecasts for the China region, we apply our trained models to the 25km global grid forecasts of CMA-GFS, an operational global model of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), and SFF, a data-driven deep learning-based weather model developed from Spherical Fourier Neural Operators (SFNO). CMA-MESO, a high-resolution regional model, is chosen as the baseline model. The experimental results demonstrate that the forecasts downscaled by our method generally outperform the direct forecasts of CMA-MESO in terms of MAE for the target variables. Our forecasts of radar composite reflectivity show that CorrDiff, as a generative model, can generate fine-scale details that lead to more realistic predictions compared to the corresponding deterministic regression models.