English

LangPrecip: Language-Aware Multimodal Precipitation Nowcasting

Machine Learning 2026-05-15 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Short-term precipitation nowcasting is an inherently uncertain and under-constrained spatiotemporal forecasting problem, especially for rapidly evolving and extreme weather events. Existing generative approaches rely primarily on visual conditioning, leaving future motion weakly constrained and ambiguous. We propose a language-aware multimodal nowcasting framework(LangPrecip) that treats meteorological text as a semantic motion constraint on precipitation evolution. By formulating nowcasting as a semantically constrained trajectory generation problem under the Rectified Flow paradigm, our method enables efficient and physically consistent integration of textual and radar information in latent space.We further introduce LangPrecip-160k, a large-scale multimodal dataset with 160k paired radar sequences and motion descriptions. Experiments on Swedish and MRMS datasets show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 60 \% and 19\% gains in heavy-rainfall CSI at an 80-minute lead time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.22317,
  title  = {LangPrecip: Language-Aware Multimodal Precipitation Nowcasting},
  author = {Xudong Ling and Chaorong Li and Tianxi Huang and Qian Dong and Guiduo Duan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.22317},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:42:05.887Z