Information 2025, 16(11), 946; https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110946 (registering DOI) - 30 Oct 2025
Abstract
Accurate and timely precipitation forecasting is critical for climate risk management, agriculture, and hydrological regulation. However, this task remains challenging due to the dynamic evolution of atmospheric systems, heterogeneous environmental factors, and frequent missing data in multi-source observations. To address these issues, we
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Accurate and timely precipitation forecasting is critical for climate risk management, agriculture, and hydrological regulation. However, this task remains challenging due to the dynamic evolution of atmospheric systems, heterogeneous environmental factors, and frequent missing data in multi-source observations. To address these issues, we propose DAHG, a novel long-term precipitation forecasting framework based on dynamic augmented heterogeneous graphs with reinforced graph generation, contrastive representation learning, and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Specifically, DAHG constructs a temporal heterogeneous graph to model the complex interactions among multiple meteorological variables (e.g., precipitation, humidity, wind) and remote sensing indicators (e.g., NDVI). The forecasting task is formulated as a dynamic spatiotemporal regression problem, where predicting future precipitation values corresponds to inferring attributes of target nodes in the evolving graph sequence. To handle missing data, we present a reinforced dynamic graph generation module that leverages reinforcement learning to complete incomplete graph sequences, enhancing the consistency of long-range forecasting. Additionally, a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy is employed to extract robust representations of multi-view graph snapshots (i.e., temporally adjacent frames and stochastically augmented graph views). Finally, DAHG integrates temporal dependency through long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to capture the evolving precipitation patterns and outputs future precipitation estimations. Experimental evaluations on multiple real-world meteorological datasets show that DAHG reduces MAE by % and improves R² by .02 over state-of-the-art baselines (p < 0.01), confirming significant gains in accuracy and robustness, particularly in scenarios with partially missing observations (e.g., due to sensor outages or cloud-covered satellite readings).
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