Improved Weather Radar Echo Extrapolation Through Wind Speed Data Fusion Using a New Spatiotemporal Neural Network Model

Weather radar echo extrapolation plays a crucial role in weather forecasting. However, traditional weather radar echo extrapolation methods are not very accurate and do not make full use of historical data. Deep learning algorithms based on Recurrent Neural Networks also have the problem of accumulating errors. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain higher accuracy by relying on a single historical radar echo observation. Therefore, in this study, we constructed the Fusion GRU module, which leverages a cascade structure to effectively combine radar echo data and mean wind data. We also designed the Top Connection so that the model can capture the global spatial relationship to construct constraints on the predictions. Based on the Jiangsu Province dataset, we compared some models. The results show that our proposed model, Cascade Fusion Spatiotemporal Network (CFSN), improved the critical success index (CSI) by 10.7% over the baseline at the threshold of 30 dBZ. Ablation experiments further validated the effectiveness of our model. Similarly, the CSI of the complete CFSN was 0.004 higher than the suboptimal solution without the cross-attention module at the threshold of 30 dBZ.