Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting with Rectified Flow Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Schusterbauer, Johannes, Wiese, Jannik, Stracke, Nick, Phan, Timy, Ommer, Björn
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Schusterbauer, Johannes
Wiese, Jannik
Stracke, Nick
Phan, Timy
Ommer, Björn
author_facet Schusterbauer, Johannes
Wiese, Jannik
Stracke, Nick
Phan, Timy
Ommer, Björn
contents Accurate weather forecasts are essential across various domains and are safety-critical in extreme weather conditions. Compared to simulation-based forecasting, data-driven approaches show greater efficiency, enabling short-term, high-resolution nowcasting. In particular, diffusion models proved effective in weather nowcasting due to their strong probabilistic foundation. However, existing methods rely on deterministic compression to reduce the complexity of high-dimensional weather data, limiting their ability to capture uncertainty in the decoding process. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{FREUD}$, a $\textbf{Fr}$ame-wise $\textbf{E}$ncoder and $\textbf{U}$nited $\textbf{D}$ecoder model based on rectified flow transformers for efficient compression of spatio-temporal weather data. Frame-wise encoding enables continuous forecast updates, while the unified video decoder ensures temporal consistency. Our uncertainty-preserving first stage allows us to capture aleatoric uncertainty via ensembling, which is particularly beneficial for extreme weather events with high decoding variability. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in precipitation nowcasting with a compact latent-space rectified flow transformer on the SEVIR benchmark and show further performance gains by model and test-time scaling. Code available here: https://github.com/CompVis/weather-rf
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31204
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting with Rectified Flow Transformers
Schusterbauer, Johannes
Wiese, Jannik
Stracke, Nick
Phan, Timy
Ommer, Björn
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate weather forecasts are essential across various domains and are safety-critical in extreme weather conditions. Compared to simulation-based forecasting, data-driven approaches show greater efficiency, enabling short-term, high-resolution nowcasting. In particular, diffusion models proved effective in weather nowcasting due to their strong probabilistic foundation. However, existing methods rely on deterministic compression to reduce the complexity of high-dimensional weather data, limiting their ability to capture uncertainty in the decoding process. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{FREUD}$, a $\textbf{Fr}$ame-wise $\textbf{E}$ncoder and $\textbf{U}$nited $\textbf{D}$ecoder model based on rectified flow transformers for efficient compression of spatio-temporal weather data. Frame-wise encoding enables continuous forecast updates, while the unified video decoder ensures temporal consistency. Our uncertainty-preserving first stage allows us to capture aleatoric uncertainty via ensembling, which is particularly beneficial for extreme weather events with high decoding variability. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in precipitation nowcasting with a compact latent-space rectified flow transformer on the SEVIR benchmark and show further performance gains by model and test-time scaling. Code available here: https://github.com/CompVis/weather-rf
title Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting with Rectified Flow Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31204