Physical Scales Matter: The Role of Receptive Fields and Advection in Satellite-Based Thunderstorm Nowcasting with Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract The focus of nowcasting development is transitioning from physically motivated advection methods to purely data-driven machine learning (ML) approaches. Nevertheless, recent work indicates that incorporating advection into the ML value chain has improved skill for radar-based precipitation nowcasts. However, the generality of this approach and the underlying causes remain unexplored. This study investigates the generality by probing the approach on satellite-based thunderstorm nowcasts for the first time. Resorting to a scale argument, we then put forth an explanation when and why skill improvements can be expected. In essence, advection guarantees that thunderstorm patterns relevant for nowcasting are contained in the receptive field at long forecast times. To test our hypotheses, we train residual U-Net (ResU-Net) solving segmentation tasks with lightning observations as ground truth. The input of the baseline neural network (BNN) is short time series of multispectral satellite imagery and lightning observations, whereas the advection-informed neural network (AINN) additionally receives the Lagrangian persistence nowcast of all input channels at the desired forecast time. Overall, we find only a minor skill improvement of the AINN over the BNN when considering fully averaged scores. However, assessing skill conditioned on forecast time and advection speed, we demonstrate that our scale argument correctly predicts the onset of skill improvement of the AINN over the BNN after 2-h forecast time. We confirm that, generally, advection becomes gradually more important with longer forecast times and higher advection speeds. Our work accentuates the importance of considering and incorporating the underlying physical scales when designing ML-based forecasting models. Significance Statement This research tests the effectiveness of combining physically motivated algorithms with artificial intelligence for short-term thunderstorm forecasts. Our neural network uses geostationary satellite imagery and lightning observations together with their advection forecasts as inputs for predicting the probability of lightning occurrence. Additionally, we propose a simple scale-based explanation for when and why incorporating physically motivated algorithms benefits convolutional neural networks, and we test this hypothesis. We find that our scale argument can roughly predict the onset of usefulness. The application of the scale argument is quite general and can aid in the development of improved forecasting models in multiple domains.