NRFormer: Nationwide Nuclear Radiation Forecasting with Spatio-Temporal Transformer

Nuclear radiation, which refers to the energy emitted from atomic nuclei during decay, poses significant risks to human health and environmental safety. Recently, advancements in monitoring technology have facilitated the effective recording of nuclear radiation levels and related factors, such as weather conditions. The abundance of monitoring data enables the development of accurate and reliable nuclear radiation forecasting models, which play a crucial role in informing decision-making for individuals and governments. However, this task is challenging due to the imbalanced distribution of monitoring stations over a wide spatial range and the non-stationary radiation variation patterns. In this study, we introduce NRFormer, a novel framework tailored for the nationwide prediction of nuclear radiation variations. By integrating a non-stationary temporal attention module, an imbalance-aware spatial attention module, and a radiation propagation prompting module, NRFormer collectively captures complex spatio-temporal dynamics of nuclear radiation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework against 11 baselines. NRFormer has been deployed online to provide 1-24-day nuclear radiation forecasts, empowering individuals and governments with timely, data-driven decisions for emergency response and public safety. Our framework is designed for general applicability and can be readily adapted for deployment in other regions. The deployed system is available at https://NRFormer.github.io and the dataset and code of the predictive model are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/NRFormer.