Multi-station multivariate weather forecasting aims to forecast future weather variables at multiple weather stations from historical surface observations. Existing station forecasting models learn statistical dependencies among discrete stations, but lack explicit physical evolution. Meanwhile, PDE-based weather models provide interpretable physical dynamics, yet require continuous fields and upper-air variables unavailable in surface station data. To bridge this gap, we propose StationPDE, a station-oriented surface PDE learning model. StationPDE constructs a terrain-aware continuous surface field from discrete station observations and decomposes its physical evolution into surface wind transport and upper-air inference. Surface wind transport explicitly evolves observable weather variables, while upper-air inference uses learnable horizontal diffusion to approximate the missing influence of unavailable upper-air variables. A parallel data-driven diffusion branch captures complementary motion patterns, and an adaptive router integrates the two forecasts for station-level multivariate forecasting. Experiments on Weather2K and MeteoNet show that StationPDE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing MSE by about 9.6% on average compared with the strongest baseline.
Figures & tables
Figure 1 : Motivation of station-oriented surface PDE modeling. (a) Wind-aligned redistribution of surface relative humidity observed from MeteoNet stations. (b) Surface PDE approximation under unavailable upper-air dynamics, where surface wind transport and upper-air influence are modeled on the station-derived surface field.
Figure 2 : The overview of the StationPDE structure.
Models
StationPDE (Ours)
CDPNet
TimeFilter
MultiPatch Former
TimeXer
TimeMixer
iTransformer
Corrformer
DLinear
weather2k
pressure
4.413 ±0.090
9.840 ±0.644
8.625 ±0.137
6.750 ±0.122
7.738 ±0.080
7.684 ±0.119
7.700 ±0.077
5.732 ±0.047
11.317 ±0.129
temp
4.607 ±0.055
5.856 ±0.101
7.058 ±0.022
6.694 ±0.038
7.121 ±0.020
7.653 ±0.020
7.118 ±0.015
5.897 ±0.016
8.356 ±0.006
humidity
127.240 ±0.807
150.312 ±2.075
171.486 ±0.824
168.889 ±0.440
165.972 ±0.204
174.633 ±0.756
171.770 ±0.373
148.102 ±0.213
187.482 ±0.078
u-wind
2.155 ±0.007
2.234 ±0.011
2.597 ±0.002
2.573 ±0.004
2.516 ±0.005
2.581 ±0.006
2.606 ±0.003
2.374 ±0.003
2.747 ±0.001
v-wind
2.194 ±0.008
2.322 ±0.013
2.820 ±0.010
2.789 ±0.009
2.768 ±0.005
2.864 ±0.013
2.863 ±0.006
2.534 ±0.003
3.083 ±0.001
metonet
temp
4.298 ±0.095
4.756 ±0.077
5.348 ±0.069
5.310 ±0.030
5.389 ±0.067
6.298 ±0.037
5.314 ±0.039
7.444 ±0.164
6.762 ±0.046
Table 1 : Experiment results (MSE) on the Weather2K and MeteoNet datasets. All models use 48 hours of historical observations to forecast the next 24 hours. Best results are marked in bold , and second-best results are underlined . Complete MAE results are reported in the appendix.
Models
StationPDE (Ours)
CDPNet
TimeFilter
MultiPatch Former
TimeXer
TimeMixer
iTransformer
Corrformer
DLinear
temp
48
6.978 ±0.179
7.288 ±0.057
8.556 ±0.183
8.397 ±0.120
8.483 ±0.055
9.274 ±0.091
8.323 ±0.075
10.449 ±0.374
9.969 ±0.136
96
9.849 ±0.278
10.685 ±0.144
12.891 ±0.154
12.845 ±0.148
12.726 ±0.118
13.352 ±0.065
12.761 ±0.051
14.452 ±0.188
13.940 ±0.063
humidity
48
103.910 ±3.200
107.508 ±0.805
122.763 ±1.142
117.479 ±0.315
118.568 ±0.778
126.363 ±0.822
120.362 ±0.260
135.347 ±1.055
122.470 ±0.283
96
133.674 ±2.090
138.263 ±0.455
146.440 ±2.454
141.550 ±0.817
142.138 ±1.698
148.828 ±0.826
144.545 ±0.504
155.502 ±1.214
139.269 ±0.108
u-wind
48
5.794 ±0.081
5.865 ±0.039
6.669 ±0.118
6.686 ±0.020
6.630 ±0.014
7.137 ±0.018
6.724 ±0.025
7.138 ±0.076
6.669 ±0.025
96
7.174 ±0.225
7.219 ±0.037
8.433 ±0.172
8.453 ±0.033
8.513 ±0.032
8.970 ±0.024
8.480 ±0.028
9.028 ±0.307
7.881 ±0.007
Table 2 : Experiment results (MSE) on the MeteoNet dataset with different forecast horizons (48h and 96h). All models use 48 hours of historical observations. Best results are marked in bold , and second-best results are underlined . Complete MAE results are reported in the appendix.
Method
pressure
temp
humidity
u-wind
v-wind
Full / StationPDE
4.41 ±0.09
4.61 ±0.06
127.24 ±0.81
2.16 ±0.01
2.19 ±0.01
w/o PDE
4.56 ±0.03
5.42 ±0.06
150.62 ±1.55
2.39 ±0.01
2.41 ±0.00
w/o Data-Driven
4.84 ±0.06
5.87 ±0.11
161.17 ±0.70
2.41 ±0.06
2.42 ±0.01
w/o Station Residual
4.72 ±0.06
5.36 ±0.11
148.95 ±0.74
2.38 ±0.01
2.40 ±0.00
w/o Lobs
4.45 ±0.07
4.76 ±0.01
134.88 ±0.61
2.16 ±0.01
2.20 ±0.01
Table 3 : Ablation study results (MSE) on the Weather2K dataset. All models use 48 hours of historical observations to forecast the next 24 hours. Best results are marked in bold based on higher-precision values.
Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss · Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), ETH Zürich · Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM), ETH Zürich +4