Paper Detail

Extending Precipitation Nowcasting Horizons via Spectral Fusion of Radar Observations and Foundation Model Priors

Yuze Qin, Qingyong Li, Zhiqing Guo, Wen Wang, Yan Liu, Yangli-ao Geng

huggingface Score 9.0

Published 2026-03-23 · First seen 2026-03-27

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Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting is critical for disaster mitigation and aviation safety. However, radar-only models frequently suffer from a lack of large-scale atmospheric context, leading to performance degradation at longer lead times. While integrating meteorological variables predicted by weather foundation models offers a potential remedy, existing architectures fail to reconcile the profound representational heterogeneities between radar imagery and meteorological data. To bridge this gap, we propose PW-FouCast, a novel frequency-domain fusion framework that leverages Pangu-Weather forecasts as spectral priors within a Fourier-based backbone. Our architecture introduces three key innovations: (i) Pangu-Weather-guided Frequency Modulation to align spectral magnitudes and phases with meteorological priors; (ii) Frequency Memory to correct phase discrepancies and preserve temporal evolution; and (iii) Inverted Frequency Attention to reconstruct high-frequency details typically lost in spectral filtering. Extensive experiments on the SEVIR and MeteoNet benchmarks demonstrate that PW-FouCast achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively extending the reliable forecast horizon while maintaining structural fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Onemissed/PW-FouCast.

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BibTeX

@misc{qin2026extending,
  title = {Extending Precipitation Nowcasting Horizons via Spectral Fusion of Radar Observations and Foundation Model Priors},
  author = {Yuze Qin and Qingyong Li and Zhiqing Guo and Wen Wang and Yan Liu and Yangli-ao Geng},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Precipitation nowcasting is critical for disaster mitigation and aviation safety. However, radar-only models frequently suffer from a lack of large-scale atmospheric context, leading to performance degradation at longer lead times. While integrating meteorological variables predicted by weather foundation models offers a potential remedy, existing architectures fail to reconcile the profound representational heterogeneities between radar imagery and meteorological data. To bridge this gap, we pr},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2603.21768},
  keywords = {frequency-domain fusion, Fourier-based backbone, spectral priors, Pangu-Weather, frequency modulation, frequency memory, inverted frequency attention, precipitation nowcasting, radar imagery, meteorological variables, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2603.21768},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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