QWRF-Net: A Quantum-Wavelet Framework with Rectified Flow for Short-Term Precipitation Nowcasting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01626v1
• Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:58:49 GMT
• Title: QWRF-Net: A Quantum-Wavelet Framework with Rectified Flow for Short-Term Precipitation Nowcasting
• Abstract summary: Key challenge in warning-oriented nowcasting is that radar precipitation fields contain strongly coupled multi-scale structures.<n>We propose QWRF-Net, a quantum-wavelet framework with rectified flow for short-term precipitation nowcasting.
• Score: 4.271790881899781
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Short-term precipitation nowcasting is important for hydrometeorological early warning, especially when intense convective rainfall may trigger urban flooding, flash floods, and other high-impact hazards. A key challenge in warning-oriented nowcasting is that radar precipitation fields contain strongly coupled multi-scale structures, while forecast quality often degrades at later lead times, making it difficult to preserve intense precipitation cores and their spatial organization over the full warning-relevant horizon. To address this problem, we propose QWRF-Net, a quantum-wavelet framework with rectified flow for short-term precipitation nowcasting. The core idea is to improve the conditional representation of precipitation by explicitly decomposing latent features into wavelet sub-bands and then performing differentiated quantum-inspired modulation in the decomposed latent space, before generating future sequences through a rectified-flow-based non-autoregressive decoder. Experiments on the KNMI radar and SEVIR benchmarks under a unified evaluation protocol show that QWRF-Net achieves favorable overall performance, with relatively consistent gains at medium-to-high precipitation thresholds, on an extreme-event subset, and in preserving intense precipitation cores and fine-scale structures. Ablation results further indicate that wavelet-based scale disentanglement, differentiated sub-band modulation, and flow-based generation provide complementary benefits within the proposed framework. Overall, these results suggest that jointly enhancing multi-scale precipitation representation and stable multi-step generation is a promising direction for warning-oriented short-term precipitation nowcasting. The observed improvements may also provide a more useful precipitation basis for downstream hydrological and warning-related applications.

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