Precipitation nowcasting is pivotal in monitoring extreme weather events and issuing early warnings for meteorological disasters. However, the inherent complexity of precipitation systems, coupled with their nonlinear spatiotemporal evolution, poses significant challenges for traditional numerical weather prediction methods in capturing multi-scale details effectively. Existing deep learning models similarly struggle to simultaneously capture local multi-scale features and global long-term spatiotemporal dependencies. To tackle this challenge, we propose SwinNowcast, a deep learning model based on the Swin Transformer architecture. Through the novel design of a multi-scale feature balancing module (M-FBM), the model dynamically integrates local-scale features with global spatiotemporal dependencies. Specifically, the multi-scale convolutional block attention module (MSCBAM) captures local multi-scale features, while the gated attention feature fusion unit (GAFFU) adaptively regulates the fusion intensity, thereby enhancing spatial structure and temporal continuity in a synergistic manner. Experiments were performed on the precipitation dataset from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) under thresholds of 0.5 mm, 5 mm, and 10 mm. The results indicate that SwinNowcast surpasses six state-of-the-art approaches regarding the critical success index (CSI) and the Heidke skill score (HSS), while markedly reducing the false alarm rate (FAR). The proposed model holds substantial practical value in applications such as short-term heavy rainfall monitoring and urban flood early warning, offering effective technological support for meteorological disaster mitigation.

Radar echo extrapolation, a critical spatiotemporal sequence forecasting task, requires precise modeling of motion trajectories and intensity evolution from sequential radar reflectivity inputs. Contemporary deep learning implementations face two operational limitations: progressive attenuation of predicted echo intensities during autoregressive inference and spectral leakage-induced diffusion at high-intensity echo boundaries. This study presents RaDiT, a hybrid architecture combining differential transformer with adversarial training for radar echo extrapolation. The framework employs a U-Net backbone augmented with vision transformer blocks, utilizing differential attention mechanisms to govern spatiotemporal interactions. Our differential attention mechanism enhances noise suppression under high-threshold conditions, effectively minimizing spurious feature generation while improving metric reliability. A conditional GAN discriminator is integrated to maintain microphysical consistency in generated sequences, simultaneously addressing spectral blurring and intensity dissipation. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate RaDiT’s superior performance in preserving spatiotemporal coherence and intensity across 0–90 min forecasting horizons. The proposed architecture achieves CSI improvements of 10.23% and 2.88% at 4 × 4 and 16 × 16 spatial pooling scales, respectively, for ≥30 dBZ thresholds on the CMARC dataset compared to PreDiff. To our knowledge, this represents the first successful implementation of differential transformers for radar echo extrapolation.

To address the challenge of insufficient spatial resolution in remote sensing precipitation data, this paper proposes a novel Multi-Scale Residual Generative Adversarial Network (MSRGAN) for reconstructing high-resolution precipitation images. The model integrates multi-source meteorological information and topographic priors, and it employs a Deep Multi-Scale Perception Module (DeepInception), a Multi-Scale Feature Modulation Module (MSFM), and a Spatial-Channel Attention Network (SCAN) to achieve high-fidelity restoration of complex precipitation structures. Experiments conducted using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation data over the continental United States demonstrate that MSRGAN outperforms traditional interpolation methods and state-of-the-art deep learning models across various metrics, including Critical Success Index (CSI), Heidke Skill Score (HSS), False Alarm Rate (FAR), and Jensen–Shannon divergence. Notably, it exhibits significant advantages in detecting heavy precipitation events. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each module. The results indicate that MSRGAN not only improves the accuracy of precipitation downscaling but also preserves spatial structural consistency and physical plausibility, offering a novel technological approach for urban flood warning, weather forecasting, and regional hydrological modeling.