Nowcasting leverages real-time atmospheric conditions to forecast weather over short periods. State-of-the-art models, including PySTEPS, encounter difficulties in accurately forecasting extreme weather events because of their unpredictable distribution patterns. In this study, we design a physics-informed neural network to perform precipitation nowcasting using the precipitation and meteorological data from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). This model draws inspiration from the novel Physics-Informed Discriminator GAN (PID-GAN) formulation, directly integrating physics-based supervision within the adversarial learning framework. The proposed model adopts a GAN structure, featuring a Vector Quantization Generative Adversarial Network (VQ-GAN) and a Transformer as the generator, with a temporal discriminator serving as the discriminator. Our findings demonstrate that the PID-GAN model outperforms numerical and SOTA deep generative models in terms of precipitation nowcasting downstream metrics.

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Nowcasting is an observation-based method that uses the current state of the atmosphere to forecast future weather conditions over several hours. Recent studies have shown the promising potential of using deep learning models for precipitation nowcasting. In this paper, novel deep generative models are proposed for precipitation nowcasting. These models are equipped with extreme-value losses to more reliably predict extreme precipitation events. The proposed deep generative model contains a Vector Quantization Generative Adversarial Network and a Transformer ("VQGAN + Transformer"). For enhanced modeling and forecasting of extreme events, Extreme Value Loss (EVL) is incorporated in the autore-gressive Transformer. The numerical results show that the proposed model achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art conventional nowcasting method PySTEPS for predicting nominal values. By incorporating an EVL, the proposed model yields more accurate nowcasting of extreme precipitation.@en

Extreme precipitation usually leads to substantial impacts. Floods in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in the summer of 2021 have caused loss of lives, destruction of infrastructures, and long-term effect on economics. To avoid such disasters, it is important to develop a reliable and accurate method to predict heavy rain. @en

We typically search for images by keywords, e.g., when looking for images of apples, we would enter the word “apple” as query. However, there are limitations. For example, if users input keywords in a specific language, then they may miss results labeled in other languages. Moreover, users may have an image of the object they want to obtain more information about, e.g., a landmark, but they may not know the name of it. In such scenario, word-based search is not adequate, while imagebased search would be ideally suited. These needs drive us to develop a purely content-based image search engine, meaning that users can search images with an image as query. Motivated by this use case with numerous applications, in this paper we propose and validate an image query based search engine...@en