FADiff: A Frequency-Aware Diffusion Model Based on Hybrid CNN–Transformer Network for Radar-Based Precipitation Nowcasting

Precipitation nowcasting is a critical part of meteorological services and applications. Recently, mainstream research has been focused on adopting deep learning-based models to generate the predictions, yet existing deep learning models face challenges with blurry predictions that fail to capture high-frequency meteorological details, difficulty modeling both local correlations and long-range spatial dependencies, and a fundamental signal–noise confusion within the diffusion process that degrades structural fidelity. In this paper, we propose FADiff, a novel frequency-aware diffusion model based on a hybrid CNN–Transformer network for radar-based precipitation nowcasting. A hybrid CNN–Transformer backbone is first designed to integrate the CNNs with the Transformers, jointly enabling the local and global feature extraction capability of the meteorological dynamics. Subsequently, a novel Frequency-Aware Module (FAM) is proposed to mitigate signal–noise confusion. By transforming features into the frequency domain via the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), the FAM performs content-adaptive filtering with a learnable gating mechanism, which is designed to suppress noise-dominant frequency components while benefiting high-frequency signals corresponding to real meteorological structures. Finally, these components are embedded within a latent diffusion model to form an end-to-end nowcasting framework. Extensive experiments on the CIKM and SEVIR datasets demonstrate that the proposed FADiff outperforms state-of-the-art methods across a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics. Significantly, under high-intensity precipitation thresholds, FADiff exhibits remarkable robustness and stability, presenting its superior capability in generating meteorologically critical structures with high fidelity.