journal article·2026-07-24

A Bio-Inspired Weather-System Sensing Framework for Physically Constrained Precipitation Nowcasting Correction

Youming Qu, Xian Feng, Linyan Luo, Xun Deng, Runqing Kang, Guanru Lv, Jiachi Shi, Wei Peng, Jianhong Gan, Kun Cai, Peiyang Wei, Zhibin Li

Biomimetics· Volume 11· Issue 8
Publisher page

Abstract

Accurate correction of gridded numerical weather prediction precipitation forecasts remains challenging because many end-to-end deep learning correction models treat meteorological variables as undifferentiated data channels and therefore provide limited physical interpretability. Inspired by general principles of biological environmental sensing, selective information processing, and regulatory constraint learning, this study proposes PCPNet, a bio-inspired and physically constrained precipitation correction framework. The framework does not imitate a specific biological organ or species; instead, it abstracts three information-processing principles into a meteorological correction task. First, key weather-system cues, including low-level shear lines, trough-ridge effects, upper-level jet-stream forcing, vorticity-divergence-related vertical motion, and water-vapor flux convergence, are quantified as structured diagnostic fields. This transforms the subjective synoptic diagnosis of forecasters into automated grid-based sensing features. Second, these diagnostic cues are fused with numerical weather prediction variables and terrain descriptors in an encoder–attention–decoder network, allowing the model to emphasize dynamically important precipitation-triggering regions. Third, water-vapor conservation and terrain-forcing relationships are embedded as differentiable constraint losses, providing training-time constraint-based regulation that guides the corrected precipitation field toward physically consistent solutions. The method is evaluated from 2021 to 2023 in Hunan Province, China, using hourly numerical weather prediction model outputs as input features, China Meteorological Administration Land Data Assimilation System gridded analysis data as the training target, and independent meteorological station observations for strict cross-validation. PCPNet reduces the mean absolute error by 22.1% compared with the uncorrected China Meteorological Administration Land Data Assimilation System gridded precipitation products and outperforms Linear Regression, Bagging, Boosting, Multi-Layer Perceptron, TabNet, and Tree-based Progressive Regression Models by 12.9%, 13.5%, 16.9%, 10.8%, 14.9%, and 15.9%, respectively. The single-day event analysis provides an initial demonstration of heavy precipitation recovery capability, while comprehensive validation across long-term continuous weather events is planned for future operational deployment to further verify model stability. These results indicate that bio-inspired sensing and regulatory constraint learning can improve both the accuracy and interpretability of precipitation nowcasting correction.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Affiliations

Changde Meteorological Bureau, Changde 415000, China

Hunan Meteorological Data Center, Hunan Meteorological Bureau, Changsha 410118, China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

College of Software Engineering, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China

Sichuan Key Laboratory of Software Automatic Generation and Intelligent Service, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China

Key Laboratory of Meteorological Software China Meteorological Administration, Chengdu 610225, China

Dazhou Key Laboratory of Government Data Security, Sichuan University of Arts and Science, Dazhou 635000, China

Funding

National Funded Postdoctoral Research Program · Open Research Project of the Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory of Software Auto-generation and Intelligent Service · Open Fund of the Sichuan Provincial University Key Laboratory of Intelligent Unmanned System Technology · Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region · Open Project of the Dazhou Key Laboratory of Government Data Security

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