IRENE: A Convolutional GRU Ensemble Model for Radar Precipitation Nowcasting over Italy

📅 2026-09-15
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
IRENE模型使用多尺度ConvGRU解决意大利地区降水临近预报问题,通过重要性采样和概率损失函数优化预测准确性。
📝 Abstract
We present IRENE (Italian Radar Ensemble Nowcasting Experiment), a deep learning model for probabilistic short-range precipitation nowcasting over the Italian domain at \SI{1}{km} spatial and 5 min temporal resolution. IRENE adopts an encoder--forecaster architecture built on multi-scale Convolutional Gated Recurrent Units (ConvGRUs), trained on the national radar composite produced by the Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC). An importance-sampling scheme focuses training on precipitation-relevant events, while the almost-fair Continuous Ranked Probability Score (afCRPS) is adopted as the primary probabilistic loss function. Two additional training configurations are proposed: an adversarial (GAN) variant, IRENE-GAN, designed to improve the spatial sharpness of the generated forecasts, and a spectrally constrained variant, IRENE-GAN-RAPSD, in which the adversarial objective is complemented by an explicit penalty on the radially averaged power spectral density. The three configurations are evaluated against the stochastic extrapolation method STEPS and the pre-trained deep learning model DGMR. All IRENE configurations attain a lower Continuous Ranked Probability Score than both benchmarks at every lead time and rank histograms closer to uniformity, indicating better probabilistic skill and ensemble calibration. In terms of ensemble-mean mean absolute error the advantage is confined to the first 90 min, beyond which the strongly damped DGMR fields and, to a lesser extent, STEPS become competitive. Spectral analysis shows that the adversarial training removes the progressive loss of small-scale variance exhibited by IRENE, at the cost of an excess of fine-scale power at long lead times that the spectral penalty only partially controls.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

precipitation nowcasting
short-range forecasting
probabilistic forecasting
deep learning model
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

ConvGRU
importance-sampling scheme
afCRPS
adversarial training
spectral penalty
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