XuDong Ling

XuDong Ling, ChaoRong Li, FengQing Qin et al.

Deep neural networks have made great achievements in rainfall prediction.However, the current forecasting methods have certain limitations, such as with blurry generated images and incorrect spatial positions. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Two-stage Rainfall-Forecasting Diffusion Model (TRDM) aimed at improving the accuracy of long-term rainfall forecasts and addressing the imbalance in performance between temporal and spatial modeling. TRDM is a two-stage method for rainfall prediction tasks. The task of the first stage is to capture robust temporal information while preserving spatial information under low-resolution conditions. The task of the second stage is to reconstruct the low-resolution images generated in the first stage into high-resolution images. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the MRMS and Swedish radar datasets. Our project is open source and available on GitHub at: \href{https://github.com/clearlyzerolxd/TRDM}{https://github.com/clearlyzerolxd/TRDM}.

Xudong Ling, Tianxi Huang, Qian Dong et al.

Short-term precipitation nowcasting is an inherently uncertain and under-constrained spatiotemporal forecasting problem, especially for rapidly evolving and extreme weather events. Existing generative approaches rely primarily on visual conditioning, leaving future motion weakly constrained and ambiguous. We propose a language-aware multimodal nowcasting framework(LangPrecip) that treats meteorological text as a semantic motion constraint on precipitation evolution. By formulating nowcasting as a semantically constrained trajectory generation problem under the Rectified Flow paradigm, our method enables efficient and physically consistent integration of textual and radar information in latent space.We further introduce LangPrecip-160k, a large-scale multimodal dataset with 160k paired radar sequences and motion descriptions. Experiments on Swedish and MRMS datasets show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 60 \% and 19\% gains in heavy-rainfall CSI at an 80-minute lead time.

Xudong Ling, Chaorong Li, Fengqing Qin et al.

Diffusion models are widely used in image generation because they can generate high-quality and realistic samples. This is in contrast to generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs), which have some limitations in terms of image quality.We introduce the diffusion model to the precipitation forecasting task and propose a short-term precipitation nowcasting with condition diffusion model based on historical observational data, which is referred to as SRNDiff. By incorporating an additional conditional decoder module in the denoising process, SRNDiff achieves end-to-end conditional rainfall prediction. SRNDiff is composed of two networks: a denoising network and a conditional Encoder network. The conditional network is composed of multiple independent UNet networks. These networks extract conditional feature maps at different resolutions, providing accurate conditional information that guides the diffusion model for conditional generation.SRNDiff surpasses GANs in terms of prediction accuracy, although it requires more computational resources.The SRNDiff model exhibits higher stability and efficiency during training than GANs-based approaches, and generates high-quality precipitation distribution samples that better reflect future actual precipitation conditions. This fully validates the advantages and potential of diffusion models in precipitation forecasting, providing new insights for enhancing rainfall prediction.

ChaoRong Li, XuDong Ling, YiLan Xue et al.

Short-term precipitation forecasting remains challenging due to the difficulty in capturing long-term spatiotemporal dependencies. Current deep learning methods fall short in establishing effective dependencies between conditions and forecast results, while also lacking interpretability. To address this issue, we propose a Precipitation Nowcasting Using Diffusion Transformer with Causal Attention model. Our model leverages Transformer and combines causal attention mechanisms to establish spatiotemporal queries between conditional information (causes) and forecast results (results). This design enables the model to effectively capture long-term dependencies, allowing forecast results to maintain strong causal relationships with input conditions over a wide range of time and space. We explore four variants of spatiotemporal information interactions for DTCA, demonstrating that global spatiotemporal labeling interactions yield the best performance. In addition, we introduce a Channel-To-Batch shift operation to further enhance the model's ability to represent complex rainfall dynamics. We conducted experiments on two datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art U-Net-based methods, our approach improved the CSI (Critical Success Index) for predicting heavy precipitation by approximately 15% and 8% respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance.