GLKC-Net: Group Large Kernel Convolution for Short-Range Precipitation Forecasting

Accurate short-range precipitation prediction plays a crucial role in daily life and disaster mitigation. However, the existing methods often suffer from inefficient large-scale feature extraction, severe redundant information interference, and insufficient attention to the problem of imbalanced data distributions, leading to unsatisfactory performance. To address these issues, in this paper, we first propose a novel spatiotemporal module called Group Large Kernel Convolution (GLKC) and develop a short-range precipitation forecasting model based on it, GLKC-Net, using multiple meteorological variables. Specifically, we use decomposed large-kernel convolution to enhance the ability to understand large-scale atmospheric processes. Meanwhile, we introduce the group convolution and channel shuffle operator to control the fusion of channel-wise information, enabling efficient information exchange and reducing redundancy in the channel dimension with multiple variables. Furthermore, we treat the causes of poor model performance for extreme precipitation events with an imbalanced data distribution perspective and design a Multi-threshold Adaptive Loss function (MTA Loss). This function strengthens the model’s focus on high-threshold precipitation events that are inherently difficult to forecast, aiming to improve model performance for extreme events. Finally, forecasting experiments for validation were conducted over southwestern China using ERA5-Land and CMPAS datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several existing approaches in terms of forecasting accuracy.