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.

Radar echo extrapolation based on real-world data is a fundamental problem in meteorological forecasting. Existing extrapolation models typically assume complete radar echo sequences, but in practice, data loss frequently occurs due to equipment failures and communication disruptions. Although traditional solutions can handle missing values through a interpolation-then-prediction pipeline, they suffer from a major limitation: interpolating the missing data and then extrapolating will introduce a cumulative error. To address these issues, we propose MissPred, a radar echo extrapolation model specifically designed for missing data patterns. MissPred employs a dual encoder–decoder architecture. Specifically, the training process involves the sequential execution of interpolation and extrapolation as two distinct serial tasks. In order to circumvent the occurrence of cumulative errors, interpolation and extrapolation are required to share encoder parameters. Furthermore, a missing spatiotemporal feature fusion module (MSTF) that is absent has been designed for the purpose of extracting fine-grained complete spatiotemporal features. Finally, the incorporation of adversarial training is introduced to enhance the authenticity of the prediction results. In order to evaluate the proposed model, case studies are conducted on real radar datasets. Our dataset covers missing rates ranging from 10% to 50%. The experimental results show that the model outperforms the baseline model with the prior interpolation of missing data in the missing mode with stable robustness.