How Effective Are Time-Series Models for Rainfall Nowcasting? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Rainfall Nowcasting Incorporating PWV Data

Abstract: Rainfall nowcasting, which aims to predict precipitation within the next 0 to 3 hours, is critical for disaster mitigation and real-time response planning. However, most time series forecasting benchmarks in meteorology are evaluated on variables with strong periodicity, such as temperature and humidity, which fail to reflect model capabilities in more complex and practically meteorology scenarios like rainfall nowcasting. To address this gap, we propose RainfallBench, a benchmark designed for rainfall nowcasting, a highly challenging and practically relevant task characterized by zero inflation, temporal decay, and non-stationarity, focused on predicting precipitation within the next 0 to 3 hours. The dataset is derived from five years of meteorological observations, recorded at 15-minute intervals across six essential variables, and collected from more than 12,000 GNSS stations globally. In particular, it incorporates precipitable water vapor (PWV), a crucial indicator of rainfall that is absent in other datasets. We further design specialized evaluation strategies to assess model performance on key meteorological challenges, such as multi-scale prediction and extreme rainfall events, and evaluate over 20 state-of-the-art models across six major architectures on RainfallBench. Additionally, to address the zero-inflation and temporal decay issues overlooked by existing models, we introduce Bi-Focus Precipitation Forecaster (BFPF), a plug-and-play module that incorporates domain-specific priors to enhance rainfall time series forecasting. Statistical analysis and ablation studies validate the comprehensiveness of our dataset as well as the superiority of our methodology. Code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RainfallBench-A710.