EGU24-19377, updated on 11 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-19377
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Advancing Spatiotemporal Rainfall Nowcasting through Deep Learning Techniques

Ahmed Abdelhalim1,2, Miguel Rico-Ramirez1, Weiru Liu3, and Dawei Han1
Ahmed Abdelhalim et al.
  • 1Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol, United Kingdom (ahmed.abdelhalim@bristol.ac.uk)
  • 2Geology Department, Faculty of Science, Minia University, Egypt (ahmed_abdelhalim@mu.edu.eg)
  • 3Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, United Kingdom (weiru.liu@bristol.ac.uk)

For weather forecasters and hydrologists, predicting rainfall in the short term – minutes to a few hours – is crucial for a range of applications. While traditional nowcasting methods excel in operational settings, they face limitations in predicting convective storm formation and high-intensity events. Enter deep learning, a powerful tool transforming numerous fields. Convolutional neural networks, in particular, have shown promise in improving nowcasting accuracy. These networks can learn complex patterns and relationships within data, like the intricate tapestry of rainfall variations observed in historical radar sequences. However, capturing long-term dependencies in this data remains a challenge, resulting in fuzzy nowcasts and underestimating high-intensity events. This study proposes a novel deep learning model that goes beyond simple extrapolation, effectively capturing both the spatial correlations and temporal dependencies within rainfall data. Our hybrid convolutional neural network architecture tackles this challenge through three key components: Decoder & Encoder: These modules focus on unraveling the intricate spatial patterns of rainfall and a temporal Module to learn the subtle long-term evolutions and interactions between rain cells over time. By capturing these temporal dependencies, the model can produce more accurate forecasts. To evaluate the model performance, it is compared against both deep learning and optical flow baselines. This presentation will introduce the model and provide a summary of its performance in spatiotemporal rainfall nowcasting.

Keywords: deep learning; spatiotemporal encoding, rainfall nowcasting; radar; optical flow

How to cite: Abdelhalim, A., Rico-Ramirez, M., Liu, W., and Han, D.: Advancing Spatiotemporal Rainfall Nowcasting through Deep Learning Techniques, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-19377, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-19377, 2024.