Deep Learning for Precipitation Estimation from Satellite and Rain Gauges Measurements

This paper proposes a multimodal and multi-task deep-learning model for instantaneous precipitation rate estimation. Using both thermal infrared satellite radiometer and automatic rain gauge measurements as input, our encoder–decoder convolutional neural network performs a multiscale analysis of these two modalities to estimate simultaneously the rainfall probability and the precipitation rate value. Precipitating pixels are detected with a Probability Of Detection (POD) of 0.75 and a False Alarm Ratio (FAR) of 0.3. Instantaneous precipitation rate is estimated with a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 1.6 mm/h.