Rainformer: Features Extraction Balanced Network for Radar-Based Precipitation Nowcasting

Precipitation nowcasting is one of the fundamental challenges in natural hazard research. High-intensity rainfall, especially the rainstorm, will lead to the enormous loss of people’s property. Existing methods usually utilize convolution operation to extract rainfall features and increase the network depth to expand the receptive field to obtain fake global features. Although this scheme is simple, only local rainfall features can be extracted leading to insensitivity to high-intensity rainfall. This letter proposes a novel precipitation nowcasting framework named Rainformer, in which, two practical components are proposed: the global features extraction unit and the gate fusion unit (GFU). The former provides robust global features learning ability depending on the window-based multi-head self-attention (W-MSA) mechanism, while the latter provides a balanced fusion of local and global features. Rainformer has a simple yet efficient architecture and significantly improves the accuracy of rainfall prediction, especially on high-intensity rainfall. It offers a potential solution for real-world applications. The experimental results show that Rainformer outperforms seven state of the arts methods on the benchmark database and provides more insights into the high-intensity rainfall prediction task.