MAFormer: A New Method for Radar Reflectivity Reconstructing Using Satellite Data

Abstract

Radar reflectivity plays a crucial role in detecting heavy rainfall and is an important tool for meteorological analysis. However, the coverage of a single radar is limited, leading to the use of satellite data as a complementary source. Consequently, how to bridge the gap between radar and satellite data has become a growing research focus. In this paper, we present MAFormer, a novel model for reconstructing radar reflectivity using satellite data within the Transformer framework. MAFormer consists of two modules: the Axial Local Attention Module and the Mixup Global Attention Module, which extract both local saliency and global similarity. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Specifically, the MAFormer model exhibits notable advancements when compared to state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. It demonstrates an improvement ranging from 0.01 to 0.05 in terms of the Heidke skill score, indicating its superior performance. Additionally, MAFormer effectively mitigates false alarm rates by approximately 0.016 to 0.04, which further highlights its enhanced accuracy and reliability.

Keywords

• radar reconstruction
• satellite
• transformer
• axial local attention
• mixup global attention