Application of Optical Flow Method for Extrapolating Radar Echoes

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-726-7_44How to use a DOI?

Keywords

short-term precipitation forecasting; optical flow method; radar echo extrapolation; weather prediction; real-time forecasting

Abstract

Short-term precipitation forecasting is one of the key challenges in meteorological predictions and plays a critical role in real-time weather disaster response and mitigation. Weather conditions are primarily obtained through radar echo information, and short-term forecasts mainly rely on the prediction of radar echo trends. This study proposes a “Optical Flow” based extrapolation method for near-term forecasting to simulate and predict imminent weather situations. By analyzing the temporal variations of radar echoes, atmospheric motion features and vector information are extracted to provide physically meaningful precipitation forecasts. In forecast tests from 0 to 60 min, the optical flow method demonstrated excellent detection capabilities, with a Probability of Detection (POD) score exceeding 0.5 and a Critical Success Index (CSI) above 0.4 at the 30-min forecast period, showing strong predictive performance. Furthermore, the method’s computation time for the 30-min forecast is approximately 5.4 s, meeting the real-time forecasting requirements. This study demonstrates that the optical flow method offers efficient computational performance and reliable forecasting ability in short-term precipitation prediction, providing an effective technical approach for this field. (Abstract).

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiangqian Wei
AU  - Xinyu Chang
AU  - Yi Liu
AU  - Jun Guo
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/06/13
TI  - Application of Optical Flow Method for Extrapolating Radar Echoes
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 6th International Conference on Hydraulic, Civil and Construction Engineering (HCCE 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 455
EP  - 464
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-726-7_44
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-726-7_44
ID  - Wei2025
ER  -