PiMMNet: Introducing Multi-Modal Precipitation Nowcasting via a Physics-informed Perspective

Precipitation nowcasting plays a pivotal role in urban planning and disaster mitigation, where extending forecast horizons offers critical advantages for proactive decision-making. Most data-driven methods focus on modeling radar echo sequences through end-to-end spatiotemporal predictive learning, yielding precise short-term predictions; however, they fundamentally neglect the inherent physical mechanism governing precipitation system. Moreover, approaches relying solely on single-modality radar observations suffer from persistent information bottlenecks, severely limiting their temporal generalizability for extended forecasting. To address these challenges, we propose PiMMNet, a Physics-informed Multi-Modal Network. It is constructed based on the advection-diffusion principle from fluid dynamics, explicitly modeling the precipitation evolution as a spatiotemporal transport processes characterized by the deterministic advection and the stochastic source. We carefully design a multi-model motion estimation network and a motion-guided diffusion model to describe the deterministic and stochastic terms, respectively. The core innovation of our method lies in jointly estimating a physics-constrained velocity field from multi-modal inputs (radar and satellite data). In this case, we naturally align the motion evolution among modalities into a unified representation, inherently mitigating cross-modal distribution biases. Experimental evaluations on two real-world multi-modal meteorological datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing significant improvements in accuracy and robustness for longer-range precipitation nowcasting. Our code are available at https://github.com/DeminYu98/PiMMNet.