Abstract: Precipitation nowcasting refers to the high-resolution prediction of precipitation in the short term, which is an important but difficult task. In the context of deep learning, it is viewed as a radar echo map-based spatiotemporal sequence prediction problem. Precipitation prediction is a complex self-supervised task. Since the motion always changes significantly in both spatial and temporal dimensions, it is difficult for ordinary models to cope with complex nonlinear spatiotemporal transformations, resulting in blurred predictions. Therefore, how to further improve the model prediction performance and reduce ambiguity is a key focus of research in this field. Currently, the research on precipitation nowcasting is still in the early stage, and there is a lack of systematic classification and discussion about the existing research work. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive investigation in this field. This paper comprehensively summarizes and analyzes the relevant knowledge in the field of precipitation nowcasting from different dimensions, and gives future research directions. The specific contents are as follows: (1) The significance of precipitation nowcasting, and the advantages and disadvantages of traditional forecasting models are clarified. (2) The mathematical definition of the nowcasting problem is given. (3) Common predictive models are comprehensively summarized, analyzed. (4) Several open source radar datasets in different countries and regions are introduced, and download links are given. (5) The metrics used for prediction quality assessment are briefly introduced. (6) The different loss functions used in different models is discussed. (7) The research direction of precipitation nowcasting in the future is pointed out.

Key words: precipitation nowcasting, spatiotemporal sequence prediction, weather forecast, artificial intelligence, deep learning