Extending Precipitation Nowcasting Horizons via Spectral Fusion of Radar Observations and Foundation Model Priors
This work addresses precipitation nowcasting for disaster mitigation and aviation safety, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of precipitation nowcasting by addressing the lack of large-scale atmospheric context in radar-only models, proposing PW-FouCast, a frequency-domain fusion framework that integrates Pangu-Weather forecasts as spectral priors, achieving state-of-the-art performance on SEVIR and MeteoNet benchmarks and extending the reliable forecast horizon.
Precipitation nowcasting is critical for disaster mitigation and aviation safety. However, radar-only models frequently suffer from a lack of large-scale atmospheric context, leading to performance degradation at longer lead times. While integrating meteorological variables predicted by weather foundation models offers a potential remedy, existing architectures fail to reconcile the profound representational heterogeneities between radar imagery and meteorological data. To bridge this gap, we propose PW-FouCast, a novel frequency-domain fusion framework that leverages Pangu-Weather forecasts as spectral priors within a Fourier-based backbone. Our architecture introduces three key innovations: (i) Pangu-Weather-guided Frequency Modulation to align spectral magnitudes and phases with meteorological priors; (ii) Frequency Memory to correct phase discrepancies and preserve temporal evolution; and (iii) Inverted Frequency Attention to reconstruct high-frequency details typically lost in spectral filtering. Extensive experiments on the SEVIR and MeteoNet benchmarks demonstrate that PW-FouCast achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively extending the reliable forecast horizon while maintaining structural fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Onemissed/PW-FouCast.