Tianchi Xu

Tianchi Xu, Ziqiang Ma, Andrea Marinoni et al.

Accurate four-dimensional (4D) precipitation information is essential for understanding the Earth's energy and water cycles, yet remains observationally unresolved at global scales. Conventional theory holds that geostationary infrared observations primarily sense cloud-top properties, with limited sensitivity to sub-cloud precipitation. Here we show that cloud-top infrared measurements nevertheless encode sufficient information to recover the four-dimensional structure of precipitation, revealing a previously unexploited observability of sub-cloud processes. We introduce a physically constrained deep learning framework, 4DPrecipNet, in which a moisture-first constraint requires the latent representation to recover precipitable water vapour, anchoring the model in thermodynamic consistency. By integrating multi-channel infrared radiances with these constraints and radar-derived precipitation profiles, we reconstruct the vertical and temporal evolution of precipitation systems from geostationary orbit. The framework captures deep convective structures and their evolution, with robust performance across large samples and independent radar comparisons. These results demonstrate that sub-cloud precipitation is physically encoded in cloud-top infrared observations, establishing a new pathway for continuous global monitoring of precipitation structure.

Tianchi Xu

Atmospheric structure, represented by backscatter coefficients (BC) recovered from satellite LiDAR attenuated backscatter (ATB), provides a volumetric view of clouds, aerosols, and molecules, playing a critical role in human activities, climate understanding, and extreme weather forecasting. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary inputs and simplified physics-based approximations, and lack a standardized 3D benchmark for fair evaluation. However, such approaches may introduce additional uncertainties and insufficiently capture realistic radiative transfer and atmospheric scattering-absorption effects. To bridge these gaps, we present Atmos-Bench: the first 3D atmospheric benchmark, along with a novel FourCastX: Frequency-enhanced Spatio-Temporal Mixture-of-Experts Network that (a) generates 921,600 image slices from 3D scattering volumes simulated at 532 nm and 355 nm by coupling WRF with an enhanced COSP simulator over 384 land-ocean time steps, yielding high-quality voxel-wise references; (b) embeds ATB-BC physical constraints into the model architecture, promoting energy consistency during restoration; (c) achieves consistent improvements on the Atmos-Bench dataset across both 355 nm and 532 nm bands, outperforming state-of-the-art baseline models without relying on auxiliary inputs. Atmos-Bench establishes a new standard for satellite-based 3D atmospheric structure recovery and paves the way for deeper climate insight.