# Hybrid Quantum-Classical Spatiotemporal Forecasting for 3D Cloud Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29407/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [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 to represent sub-grid processes in climate models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04731/) (2018)
- [Earthformer: Exploring Space-Time Transformers for Earth System Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05833/) (2022)
- [PredRNN++: Towards A Resolution of the Deep-in-Time Dilemma in Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06300/) (2018)
- [Quantum Long Short-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01783/) (2020)
- [Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12126/) (2022)
- [SimVPv2: Towards Simple yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12509/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate forecasting of three-dimensional (3D) cloud fields is important for atmospheric analysis and short-range numerical weather prediction, yet it remains challenging because cloud evolution involves cross-layer interactions, nonlocal dependencies, and multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models based on convolutions, recurrence, or attention often rely on locality-biased representations and therefore struggle to preserve fine cloud structures in volumetric forecasting tasks. To address this issue, we propose QENO, a hybrid quantum-inspired spatiotemporal forecasting framework for 3D cloud fields. The proposed architecture consists of four components: a classical spatiotemporal encoder for compact latent representation, a topology-aware quantum enhancement block for modeling nonlocal couplings in latent space, a dynamic fusion temporal unit for integrating measurement-derived quantum features with recurrent memory, and a decoder for reconstructing future cloud volumes. Experiments on CMA-MESO 3D cloud fields show that QENO consistently outperforms representative baselines, including ConvLSTM, PredRNN++, Earthformer, TAU, and SimVP variants, in terms of MSE, MAE, RMSE, SSIM, and threshold-based detection metrics. In particular, QENO achieves an MSE of 0.2038, an RMSE of 0.4514, and an SSIM of 0.6291, while also maintaining a compact parameter budget. These results indicate that topology-aware hybrid quantum-classical feature modeling is a promising direction for 3D cloud structure forecasting and atmospheric Earth observation data analysis.