Enhanced Migratory Biological Echo Extrapolation from Weather Radar Using ISA-LSTM

Weather radar provides continuous, large-scale observations of aerial biological activity. However, biological echoes typically exhibit weak signals, sparse distributions, and non-stationary abrupt variations, causing existing extrapolation models to suffer from over-smoothing and loss of detail and making it difficult to capture their short-term evolution effectively. To address this issue, we propose an Integrated Self-Attention Long Short-Term Memory (ISA-LSTM) model that integrates a self-attention mechanism within the Predictive Recurrent Neural Network (PredRNN) framework. Coupled convolutional modules are introduced to enhance feature interactions between inputs and hidden states, while a spatiotemporal self-attention mechanism improves long-term dependency modeling and local detail preservation. Experiments conducted on 6000 biological echo samples from three weather radars in the Poyang Lake region demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior extrapolation accuracy and stability compared with existing methods, maintaining a low false-alarm rate for lead times of up to 50 min. The results suggest that ISA-LSTM offers an effective deep learning approach for biological echo extrapolation, with applications in aviation safety and agricultural pest and disease early warning.