ED-DRAP: Encoder–Decoder Deep Residual Attention Prediction Network for Radar Echoes

Precipitation nowcasting is quite important and fundamental. It underlies various public services ranging from rainstorm warnings to flight safety. In order to further improve the prediction accuracy for the spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem, we propose an encoder–decoder deep residual attention prediction network, which adaptively rescales the multiscale sequence- and spatial-wise features and achieves very deep trainable residual prediction by integrating global residual learning and local deep residual sequence and spatial attention blocks (RSSABs). Experiments in a real-world radar echo map dataset of South China show that compared with the ingenious PredRNN++, TrajGRU methods, and newly proposed Unet-based methods, our ED-DRAP network performs better on the precipitation nowcasting metrics, as well as occupies small GPU memory.