# SimCast: Enhancing Precipitation Nowcasting with Short-to-Long Term Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07953 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07953/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [Skillful Precipitation Nowcasting using Deep Generative Models of Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00954/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Physical Dynamics from Unknown Factors for Unsupervised Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01460/) (2020)
- [SimVP: Simpler yet Better Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05099/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Precipitation Nowcasting: A Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03458/) (2017)
- [PredRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network for Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09504/) (2021)
- [Earthformer: Exploring Space-Time Transformers for Earth System Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05833/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Video Prediction and Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07696/) (2022)
- [PreDiff: Precipitation Nowcasting with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10422/) (2023)
- [Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12126/) (2022)
- [DiffCast: A Unified Framework via Residual Diffusion for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06734/) (2023)
- [CasCast: Skillful High-resolution Precipitation Nowcasting via Cascaded Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04290/) (2024)
- [SimVPv2: Towards Simple yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12509/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MambaRain: Multi-Scale Mamba-Attention Framework for 0-3 Hour Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14606/) (2026)
- [Diffusion-Based Refinement for Kilometer-Scale Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30205/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Precipitation nowcasting predicts future radar sequences based on current observations, which is a highly challenging task driven by the inherent complexity of the Earth system. Accurate nowcasting is of utmost importance for addressing various societal needs, including disaster management, agriculture, transportation, and energy optimization. As a complementary to existing non-autoregressive nowcasting approaches, we investigate the impact of prediction horizons on nowcasting models and propose SimCast, a novel training pipeline featuring a short-to-long term knowledge distillation technique coupled with a weighted MSE loss to prioritize heavy rainfall regions. Improved nowcasting predictions can be obtained without introducing additional overhead during inference. As SimCast generates deterministic predictions, we further integrate it into a diffusion-based framework named CasCast, leveraging the strengths from probabilistic models to overcome limitations such as blurriness and distribution shift in deterministic outputs. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving mean CSI scores of 0.452 on SEVIR, 0.474 on HKO-7, and 0.361 on MeteoNet, which outperforms existing approaches by a significant margin.