2023/11/30 by Rafael Pablos Sarabia, Joachim Nyborg, Sarabia, Rafael Pablos +5 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Flood Risk Assessment and Management #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Precipitation Measurement and Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.18398
openalex publication_date 2023/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This paper presents a solution to the Weather4Cast 2023 competition, where the goal is to forecast high-resolution precipitation with an 8-hour lead time using lower-resolution satellite radiance images. We propose a simple, yet effective method for spatiotemporal feature learning using a 2D U-Net model, that outperforms the official 3D U-Net baseline in both performance and efficiency. We place emphasis on refining the dataset, through importance sampling and dataset preparation, and show that such techniques have a significant impact on performance. We further study an alternative cross-entropy loss function that improves performance over the standard mean squared error loss, while also enabling models to produce probabilistic outputs. Additional techniques are explored regarding the generation of predictions at different lead times, specifically through Conditioning Lead Time. Lastly, to generate high-resolution forecasts, we evaluate standard and learned upsampling methods. The code and trained parameters are available at https://github.com/rafapablos/w4c23-rainai.