Weather Radar Echo Extrapolation with Dynamic Weight Loss

Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting is an important tool for economic and social services, especially for forecasting severe weather. The crucial and challenging part of radar echo image prediction is the focus of radar-based precipitation nowcasting. Recently, a number of deep learning models have been designed to solve the problem of extrapolating radar images. Although these methods can generate better results than traditional extrapolation methods, the issue of error accumulation in precipitation forecasting is exacerbated by using only the mean square error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) as loss functions. In this paper, we approach the problem from the perspective of the loss function and propose dynamic weight loss (DWL), a simple but effective loss function for radar echo extrapolation. The method adds model self-adjusted dynamic weights to the weighted loss function and structural similarity index measures. Radar echo extrapolation experiments are performed on four models, ConvLSTM, ConvGRU, PredRNN, and PredRNN++. Radar reflectivity is predicted using Nanjing University C-band Polarimetric (NJU-CPOL) weather radar data. The quantitative statistics show that using the DWL method reduces the MAE of the four models by up to 10.61%, 5.31%, 14.8%, and 13.63%, respectively, over a 1 h prediction period. The results show that the DWL approach is effective in reducing the accumulation of errors over time, improving the predictive performance of currently popular deep learning models.