TRU-NET: A Deep Learning Approach to High Resolution Prediction of Rainfall

TL;DR

TRU-NET is a deep learning model that enhances high-resolution rainfall prediction by effectively modeling multi-scale spatio-temporal weather processes, outperforming existing models in accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces TRU-NET, a novel encoder-decoder deep learning architecture with a cross attention mechanism for improved rainfall prediction from climate model data.

Findings

TRU-NET achieves lower RMSE and MAE than existing DL models.

It outperforms state-of-the-art dynamical weather models.

The model produces robust results across different seasons and regions.

Abstract

Climate models (CM) are used to evaluate the impact of climate change on the risk of floods and strong precipitation events. However, these numerical simulators have difficulties representing precipitation events accurately, mainly due to limited spatial resolution when simulating multi-scale dynamics in the atmosphere. To improve the prediction of high resolution precipitation we apply a Deep Learning (DL) approach using an input of CM simulations of the model fields (weather variables) that are more predictable than local precipitation. To this end, we present TRU-NET (Temporal Recurrent U-Net), an encoder-decoder model featuring a novel 2D cross attention mechanism between contiguous convolutional-recurrent layers to effectively model multi-scale spatio-temporal weather processes. We use a conditional-continuous loss function to capture the zero-skewed %extreme event patterns of rainfall. Experiments show that our model consistently attains lower RMSE and MAE scores than a DL model prevalent in short term precipitation prediction and improves upon the rainfall predictions of a state-of-the-art dynamical weather model. Moreover, by evaluating the performance of our model under various, training and testing, data formulation strategies, we show that there is enough data for our deep learning approach to output robust, high-quality results across seasons and varying regions.