MoCast: Learning Turbulent Motions Under Physical Guidance for Precipitation Nowcasting

Precipitation nowcasting, a critical task for weather-sensitive applications, is highly challenging owing to the chaotic nature of atmospheric dynamics. Despite recent progress in deep learning, existing methods are limited in their capacity to model turbulent motions, one of the key drivers of precipitation evolution. Thus, we propose MoCast, the first work that incorporates turbulence knowledge to decompose turbulent motions into solvable components for precipitation nowcasting. Specifically, inspired by the continuity equation, MoCast introduces two core innovations: (1) a physics-guided motion module that learns turbulent motions from physically interpretable mean and fluctuating components based on Reynolds, Helmholtz, and Wavelet decomposition techniques, and (2) a motion-guided source-sink module that learns source-sink features considering the multi-scale impact from motions based on a mixture-of-experts architecture. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MoCast achieves the state-of-the-art performance. MoCast and its diffusion-based variant MoCast+ reduce CSI error by an average of 4.9% and 4.5% compared to the best deterministic and probabilistic baselines, respectively.