A method of radar echo extrapolation based on dilated convolution and attention convolution

The neural network method can obtain a higher precision of radar echo extrapolation than the traditional method. However, its application in radar echo extrapolation is still in the initial stage of exploration, and there is still much room for improvement in the extrapolation accuracy. To improve the utilization of radar echo information and extrapolation accuracy, this paper proposes a radar echo extrapolation model (ADC_Net) based on dilated convolution and attention convolution. In this model, dilated convolution, instead of the pooling operation, is used to downsample the feature matrix obtained after the standard convolution operation. In doing so, the internal data structure of the feature matrix is retained, and the spatial features of radar echo data from different scales are extracted as well. Besides, the attention convolution module is integrated in the ADC_Net model to improve its sensitivity to the target features in the feature matrix and suppress the interference information. The proposed model is tested in the extrapolation of radar echo images in the next 90 min from five aspects—extrapolated image, POD index, CSI index, FAR index, and HSS index. The experimental results show that the model can effectively improve the accuracy of radar echo extrapolation.