Open Access

ARTICLE

An Approach for Radar Quantitative Precipitation Estimation Based on Spatiotemporal Network

by Shengchun Wang, Xiaozhong Yu, Lianye Liu, Jingui Huang, Tsz Ho Wong, Chengcheng Jiang

1 School of Information Science and Engineering, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, China.
2 Hunan Meteorological Observatory, Changsha, 410118, China.
3 Blackmagic Design, Rowville, VIC 3178, Australia.

* Corresponding Author: Jingui Huang. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 65(1), 459-479. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010627

Received 14 March 2020; Accepted 13 May 2020; Issue published 23 July 2020

Abstract

Radar quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) is a key and challenging task for many designs and applications with meteorological purposes. Since the Z-R relation between radar and rain has a number of parameters on different areas, and the rainfall varies with seasons, the traditional methods are incapable of achieving high spatial and temporal resolution and thus difficult to obtain a refined rainfall estimation. This paper proposes a radar quantitative precipitation estimation algorithm based on the spatiotemporal network model (ST-QPE), which designs a convolutional time-series network QPE-Net8 and a multi-scale feature fusion time-series network QPE-Net22 to address these limitations. We report on our investigation into contrast reversal experiments with radar echo and rainfall data collected by the Hunan Meteorological Observatory. Experimental results are verified and analyzed by using statistical and meteorological methods, and show that the ST-QPE model can inverse the rainfall information corresponding to the radar echo at a given moment, which provides practical guidance for accurate short-range precipitation nowcasting to prevent and mitigate disasters efficiently.

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Citations