Precipitation Nowcasting with Satellite Imagery
This enables global precipitation nowcasting, addressing a gap for users in areas without radar coverage.
The paper tackled the problem of precipitation nowcasting being limited to regions with ground-based radars by developing a method using geostationary satellite imagery, resulting in expanded coverage for the Yandex.Weather service.
Precipitation nowcasting is a short-range forecast of rain/snow (up to 2 hours), often displayed on top of the geographical map by the weather service. Modern precipitation nowcasting algorithms rely on the extrapolation of observations by ground-based radars via optical flow techniques or neural network models. Dependent on these radars, typical nowcasting is limited to the regions around their locations. We have developed a method for precipitation nowcasting based on geostationary satellite imagery and incorporated the resulting data into the Yandex.Weather precipitation map (including an alerting service with push notifications for products in the Yandex ecosystem), thus expanding its coverage and paving the way to a truly global nowcasting service.