Precipitation Forecasting

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Precipitation forecasting spans radar-based nowcasting over minutes to hours and numerical or AI weather-model forecasts over days to weeks. Methods include convolutional and recurrent networks, transformers, multimodal data fusion, physical advection, and probabilistic generators such as diffusion and rectified-flow models; post-processing and downscaling correct biases and add local detail. Evaluation uses measures such as CSI and threat scores for event detection, alongside CRPS, Brier scores, and spatial or spectral measures for uncertainty and structure. A central challenge is producing calibrated, realistic rainfall amounts and extreme-event forecasts at longer lead times while retaining useful spatial detail across different regions and climates.

Latest papers

56 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 64% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Skillful and realistic precipitation forecasting with reinforced diffusion
Oct 28, 2026Ozan Sener, Anand Avati, David Hafner +7Precipitation Forecasting Diffusion Models
Apple · ETH Zurich · Colorado State University
RainCheck: Harnessing Historical Weather Data with Machine Learning for Rainfall Forecasting in Bangladesh
Oct 28, 2026Shahran Rahman Alve, Muhammad Zawad Mahmud, Samiha Islam +1Precipitation Forecasting Forecasting Benchmarks
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Bashundhara, Dhaka-1229, Bangladesh.
Diffusion Precipitation Generation with Medium-range Weather Forecasting
Oct 9, 2026Guowen Li, Yang Liu, Mengxuan Chen +11Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
Tsinghua University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · The Hong Kong University of S & T +5
SoftSEEPS improves ML-based precipitation forecasting
Oct 7, 2026Jost Arndt, Utku Isil, Noelia Otero +3Precipitation Forecasting
Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany · Technische Universität Berlin BIFOLD Berlin, Germany
PrecipJEPA: JEPA-Regularized Future-State Prediction with Motion-Source Rendering for Precipitation Nowcasting
Sep 30, 2026Yufeng Zhu, Dan Niu, Qiliang Wu +4Precipitation Forecasting Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture
Department of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
Methodological Changes to the Attention ResUNet Hourly Precipitation Postprocessor
Sep 29, 2026Thomas M. HamillPrecipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
The Weather Company, Atlanta, Georgia
NowcastDiT: Diffusion Transformers are Effective Precipitation Nowcasters
Sep 29, 2026Haoran Xu, Xingzhuo Guo, Yuchen Zhang +3Precipitation Forecasting Diffusion Transformer
School of Software, BNRist, Tsinghua University, China
MW-Nowcast: Six-hour ensemble nowcasting of extreme precipitation
Sep 28, 2026Ning Wang, Zuliang Fang, Weixin Jin +19Precipitation Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting
Microsoft Corporation. · City University of Hong Kong. · University of Cambridge.
Diffusion-Based Rollouts as a Stabilization Mechanism for Long-Horizon Environmental Forecasting
Sep 27, 2026Marina Vicens-Miquel, Amy McGovern, Aaron J. Hill +2Precipitation Forecasting Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
University of Oklahoma, School of Meteorology, Norman, Oklahoma · University of Oklahoma, School of Computer Science, Norman, Oklahoma · NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, Norman, Oklahoma +2
Global Evaluation of AI and NWP Precipitation Forecasts During Atmospheric River Events
Sep 26, 2026Marina Vicens-Miquel, Taylor Mandelbaum, Amy McGovern +2Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
School of Meteorology and School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, 73072, OK, USA. · NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, Norman, 73072, OK, USA. · Brightband, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Suitable Measures for the Potential Operational Utility of AI NWP Rainfall Forecasts Over Africa
Sep 24, 2026Shruti Nath, Docko Sow, Koomi Toussaint Amoussouvi +5Weather Forecasting Precipitation Forecasting
Department of Physics, University of Oxford, United Kingdom · AfriClimate AI, South Africa · ECMWF, Reading, United Kingdom +1
LoRA Adaptation Strength in Aurora-WRF: Trade-offs in Regional Heavy-Rainfall Forecasting
Sep 24, 2026Boyan Liu, Xiaoyuan ZhangWeather Forecasting Precipitation Forecasting
Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China
West-WRF AI 2-km: High-Resolution Prediction of Integrated Vapor Transport and Precipitation
Sep 22, 2026Nazak Rouzegari, Vesta Afzali Gorooh, Agniv Sengupta +6Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS), The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, USA · Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA
IRENE: A Convolutional GRU Ensemble Model for Radar Precipitation Nowcasting over Italy
Sep 15, 2026Alessandro Camilletti, Gabriele Franch, Elena Tomasi +1Convolutional RNNs Precipitation Forecasting
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
PCSDiff: Diffusion-Based Bias Correction and Super Resolution Toward Practical Operational Medium-Term Precipitation Forecast
Sep 7, 2026Yuze Sun, Shiyi Wang, Jiancheng Pan +7Precipitation Forecasting Precipitation Downscaling
Department of Earth System Science, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Institute for Global Change Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd · Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland +3
Improving global precipitation forecasts with an AI weather model trained on satellite observations
Sep 2, 2026Julian F. Schmitt, Bertrand Delorme, Robert C. King +4Precipitation Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting
X, The Moonshot Factory, Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA · Google, Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA · Environmental Science and Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA +1
GenONet: A Generative operator Network for High-Resolution Precipitation Nowcasting
Sep 1, 2026Mohammad Kian Golkar, Luciano Alves de Oliveira, Mohammad KhanjaniPrecipitation Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Sharif University of Technology
Diffusion-Based Refinement for Kilometer-Scale Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting
Aug 31, 2026Dohyun Park, Changhoon Song, Tengyuan Chang +2Precipitation Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. · Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University, Seoul,2026 Republic of Korea. · Department of Environmental Management, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Bridging short- and medium-range weather forecasting with machine learning
Aug 27, 2026Timothy A. Smith, Mariah Pope, Sergey Frolov +4Weather Forecasting Precipitation Forecasting
Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO, USA · Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Bergen, Norway · Bjerknes Center for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway +3
SimCast-S2S: A Computationally Efficient Diffusion Model for Subseasonal Precipitation Forecasting
Aug 27, 2026Hiep V. Dang, Antonios MamalakisPrecipitation Forecasting Latent Diffusion Models
Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, United States · School of Data Science, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, United States
Tracing the Unlabeled Storm: Cross-Variable Transfer in a Lagrangian Atmospheric JEPA Framework
Aug 23, 2026K M Anirudh, S Sandeep, Hariprasad KodamanaPrecipitation Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting
Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India · Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India · Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
Interpretable AI predicts a 2026 summer dry anomaly in central China
Aug 19, 2026Anran Wang, Wen Shi, Yong Luo +5Precipitation Forecasting Climate Modeling
Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Beijing Yanshan Earth Critical Zone National Research Station, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 101408, China · College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 101408, China +3
FreCast: Refining Radar Echo Intensity via Phase-Preserving Amplitude Residual Diffusion for Precipitation Nowcasting
Aug 9, 2026Heping Fang, Zihuai Yin, Kaicheng Mao +2Precipitation Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting
Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligent Computation, Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
Dense-Cast: A lightweight ensemble of deep learning architectures for precipitation nowcasting
Aug 6, 2026Gourav Jyoti Kalita, Hidam Kumarjit SinghPrecipitation Forecasting Deep Ensembles
Department of Electronics and Communication Technology, Gauhati University, Guwahati-781014, Assam, India
QWRF-Net: A Quantum-Wavelet Framework with Rectified Flow for Short-Term Precipitation Nowcasting
Aug 3, 2026Zhuo Wang, Chaorong Li, Wenjie Luo +1Precipitation Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting
School of Computer Science and Technology (School of Artificial Intelligence), Yibin University, Yibin, 644000, Sichuan, China · College of Computer Science and Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing, 400054, China
Benchmarking ConvLSTM for One-Day-Ahead IMDAA Rainfall-Field Prediction across Four Indian Cities
Jul 29, 2026Tanmay Ghosh, Shaurabh Anand, Rakesh Gomaji Nannewar +1Convolutional RNNs Precipitation Forecasting
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, India. · School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. · Complex Systems Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, India.
Physics-Based Deep Spatiotemporal Hyperlocal Radar Nowcasting with a Multi-Variable U-Net for High-Resolution Precipitation Forecasting
Jul 17, 2026Akshay Sunil, Muhammed Rashid, Raja Sekhar Sivaraju +2Precipitation Forecasting U-Net
Centre for Climate Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India · Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) in Colaba, Mumbai, India
Integrating GNSS-Derived Zenith Wet Delay into a Weather Foundation Model Improves Precipitation Forecasting
Jul 6, 2026Leonardo Trentini, Fanny Lehmann, Laura Crocetti +1Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · Computational and Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Seminar for Applied Mathematics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Enhancing the Forecasting Capability of Multi-Model Blending Algorithms for Extreme Precipitation via Joint Use of Station and Gridded Observations
Jul 6, 2026Yu Wang, Yong Cao, Kan Dai +3Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting
National Meteorological Center of China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China. · Xiong’an Institute of Meteorological Artificial Intelligence, Xiong’an New Area, 070001, China. · China Meteorological Administration Training Center, Beijing, 100081, China.
RainODE: Continuous-Time Precipitation Forecasting with Latent Neural ODEs
Jun 29, 2026Yeeun Seong, Doyi Kim, Minseok Seo +1Precipitation Forecasting Time Series Forecasting
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea

Oct 28, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Skillful and realistic precipitation forecasting with reinforced diffusion

Ozan Sener, Anand Avati, David Hafner, Jierui Lin+6

Apple · ETH Zurich · Colorado State University

Precipitation Forecasting Diffusion Models RL for Diffusion Models

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Accurate precipitation forecasting remains elusive as physics-based models struggle to resolve mesoscale convection and machine learning often yields physically inconsistent, blurred results that consistently underestimate extreme events. We present FitzRoy, the first system that simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art predictive skill and physical realism over the continental United States. Through a reinforced diffusion framework, where a conditional discrete diffusion model is refined via reinforcement learning, FitzRoy effectively resolves the long-standing trade-off between pointwise accuracy and structural fidelity. Across lead times up to 24 hours, FitzRoy consistently matches or exceeds state-of-the-art models while preserving structural realism and capturing extreme events. Its low-latency inference further enables deployment in real-time operational settings. In case studies such as the 2025 Texas Hill Country floods and the 2026 Missouri floods, FitzRoy signals record-breaking accumulations that existing models largely missed. By bridging the gap between realism and skill, FitzRoy establishes a new frontier for high-fidelity precipitation forecasting.