# Precipitation Nowcasting with Satellite Imagery

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a satellite imagery-based method for precipitation nowcasting that extends coverage beyond radar limitations, enabling more comprehensive and potentially global short-term weather forecasts.

## Contribution

The authors develop a novel satellite imagery-based precipitation nowcasting approach integrated into a real-world weather service, expanding coverage and accessibility.

## Key findings

- Expanded nowcasting coverage beyond radar regions
- Integrated satellite data into operational weather maps
- Enabled near-global precipitation forecasting

## Abstract

Precipitation nowcasting is a short-range forecast of rain/snow (up to 2 hours), often displayed on top of the geographical map by the weather service. Modern precipitation nowcasting algorithms rely on the extrapolation of observations by ground-based radars via optical flow techniques or neural network models. Dependent on these radars, typical nowcasting is limited to the regions around their locations. We have developed a method for precipitation nowcasting based on geostationary satellite imagery and incorporated the resulting data into the Yandex.Weather precipitation map (including an alerting service with push notifications for products in the Yandex ecosystem), thus expanding its coverage and paving the way to a truly global nowcasting service.