HyMePre: A Spatial–Temporal Pretraining Framework with Hypergraph Neural Networks for Short-Term Weather Forecasting

Accurate short-term weather forecasting plays a vital role in disaster response, agriculture, and energy management, where timely and reliable predictions are essential for decision-making. Graph neural networks (GNNs), known for their ability to model complex spatial structures and relational data, have achieved remarkable success in meteorological forecasting by effectively capturing spatial dependencies among distributed weather stations. However, most existing GNN-based approaches rely on pairwise station connections, limiting their capacity to represent higher-order spatial interactions. Moreover, their dependence on supervised learning makes them vulnerable to spatial heterogeneity and temporal non-stationarity. This paper introduces a novel spatial–temporal pretraining framework, Hypergraph-enhanced Meteorological Pretraining (HyMePre), which combines hypergraph neural networks with self-supervised learning to model high-order spatial dependencies and improve generalization across diverse climate regimes. HyMePre employs a two-stage masking strategy, applying spatial and temporal masking separately, to learn disentangled representations from unlabeled meteorological time series. During forecasting, dynamic hypergraphs group stations based on meteorological similarity, explicitly capturing high-order dependencies. Extensive experiments on large-scale reanalysis datasets show that HyMePre outperforms conventional GNN models in predicting temperature, humidity, and wind speed. The integration of pretraining and hypergraph modeling enhances robustness to noisy data and improves generalization to unseen climate patterns, offering a scalable and effective solution for operational weather forecasting.