UNet with Axial Transformer : A Neural Weather Model for Precipitation Nowcasting

Abstract: Making accurate weather predictions can be particularly challenging for localized storms or events that evolve on hourly timescales, such as thunderstorms. Hence, our goal for the project was to model Weather Nowcasting for making highly localized and accurate predictions that apply to the immediate future replacing the current numerical weather models and data assimilation systems with Deep Learning approaches. A significant advantage of machine learning is that inference is computationally cheap given an already-trained model, allowing forecasts that are nearly instantaneous and in the native high resolution of the input data. In this work we developed a novel method that employs Transformer-based machine learning models to forecast precipitation. This approach works by leveraging axial attention mechanisms to learn complex patterns and dynamics from time series frames. Moreover, it is a generic framework and can be applied to univariate and multivariate time series data, as well as time series embeddings data. This paper represents an initial research on the dataset used in the domain of next frame prediciton, and hence, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results in terms of metrices (PSNR = 47.67, SSIM = 0.9943) used for the given dataset using UNet with Axial Transformer.