Precipitation Spatio-Temporal Forecasting in China via DC-CNN-BiLSTM

Abstract

Accurate and reliable precipitation prediction remains a significant challenge due to an incomplete understanding of regional meteorological dynamics and limitations in forecasting routine weather events. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel model, DC-CNN-BiLSTM, which integrates a dilation causal convolutional neural network (DC-CNN) with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network. The DC-CNN component, by fusing causal and dilated convolutions, extracts multi-scale spatial features from time series data. In parallel, the BiLSTM module leverages bidirectional memory cells to capture long-term temporal dependencies. This integrated approach effectively links localized meteorological inputs with broader hydrological responses. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the DC-CNN-BiLSTM model significantly outperforms traditional models. Specifically, the model improves the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) by 9.05% compared to ConvLSTM and by 32.3% compared to ConvGRU, particularly in forecasting medium- to long-term precipitation. In conclusion, our results validate the benefits of incorporating advanced spatio-temporal feature extraction techniques for precipitation forecasting, ultimately improving disaster preparedness and resource management.