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A Space-Time Transformer for Precipitation Nowcasting

arXiv 2511.11090 ↗First posted 14 Nov 2025cs.CVcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Until recently, numerical weather prediction (NWP) models have stood rivalless in operational forecasting despite a few limitations. Namely, physically-based models are computationally demanding and struggle at short lead times, reducing their utility for nowcasting. Motivated by these shortcomings, recent work proposes AI-weather prediction (AI-WP) alternatives that emulate analysis data with neural networks. While these data-driven approaches have achieved high skill for medium-range forecasting-applications of AI-WP to precipitation and to nowcasting are less explored. To these ends, this paper discusses textitSaTformer: a video transformer adapted for precipitation nowcasting. To ameliorate some problems related to what is essentially a fat-tailed regression task, we find it prudent to formulate nowcasting as a classification problem and employ a frequency-weighted loss. This straightforward approach scored first on the NeurIPS Weather4Cast 2025 ``Cumulative Rainfall'' challenge. Code and model weights are available: texttthrefgithub.com/leharris3/w4c-25github.com/leharris3/satformer.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

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References · 23

  1. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
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  3. 2021Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?cited by 1,620
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  6. 2022Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Imagescited by 830
  7. 2022FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operatorscited by 776
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  9. 2020Disentangling Physical Dynamics from Unknown Factors for Unsupervised Video Predictioncited by 195
  10. 2021Delving into Deep Imbalanced Regressioncited by 158
  11. 2022Earthformer: Exploring Space-Time Transformers for Earth System Forecastingcited by 152
  12. 2023Precipitation nowcasting with generative diffusion modelscited by 23
11 more
  1. 2024GA-SmaAt-GNet: Generative Adversarial Small Attention GNet for Extreme Precipitation Nowcastingcited by 9
  2. 2025HRRRCast: a data-driven emulator for regional weather forecasting at convection allowing scalescited by 7
  3. 2022WeatherFusionNet: Predicting Precipitation from Satellite Datacited by 6
  4. 2022Super-resolution Probabilistic Rain Prediction from Satellite Data Using 3D U-Nets and EarthFormerscited by 5
  5. 2021A Variational U-Net for Weather Forecastingcited by 3
  6. 2022RainUNet for Super-Resolution Rain Movie Prediction under Spatio-temporal Shiftscited by 3
  7. 2023Precipitation Prediction Using an Ensemble of Lightweight Learnerscited by 3
  8. 2022Solving the Weather4cast Challenge via Visual Transformers for 3D Imagescited by 2
  9. 2024A conditional Generative Adversarial network model for the Weather4Cast 2024 Challengecited by 2
  10. 2023Skilful Precipitation Nowcasting Using NowcastNetcited by 1
  11. 2023Learning Robust Precipitation Forecaster by Temporal Frame Interpolationcited by 1

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