Field-scale soil moisture estimated from Sentinel-1 SAR data using a knowledge-guided deep learning approach

Soil moisture (SM) estimation from active microwave data remains challenging due to the complex interactions between radar backscatter and surface characteristics. While the water cloud model (WCM) provides a semi-physical approach for understanding these interactions, its empirical component often limits performance across diverse agricultural landscapes. This research presents preliminary efforts for developing a knowledge-guided deep learning approach, which integrates WCM principles into a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, to estimate field SM using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Our proposed approach leverages LSTM's capacity to capture spatiotemporal dependencies while maintaining physical consistency through a modified dual-component loss function, including a WCM-based semi-physical component and a boundary condition regularisation. The proposed approach is built upon the soil backscatter coefficients isolated from the total backscatter, together with Landsat-resolution vegetation information and surface characteristics. A four-fold spatial cross-validation was performed against in-situ SM data to assess the model performance. Results showed the proposed approach reduced SM retrieval uncertainties by 0.02 m$^3$/m$^3$ and achieved correlation coefficients (R) of up to 0.64 in areas with varying vegetation cover and surface conditions, demonstrating the potential to address the over-simplification in WCM.

DuoCast: Duo-Probabilistic Meteorology-Aware Model for Extended Precipitation Nowcasting

Recently, extended short-term precipitation nowcasting struggles with decreasing precision because of insufficient consideration of meteorological knowledge, such as weather fronts which significantly influence precipitation intensity, duration, and spatial distribution. Therefore, in this paper, we present DuoCast, a novel dual-probabilistic meteorology-aware model designed to address both broad weather evolution and micro-scale fluctuations using two diffusion models, PrecipFlow and MicroDynamic, respectively. Our PrecipFlow model captures evolution trends through an Extreme Precipitation-Aware Encoder (EPA-Encoder), which includes AirConvolution and FrontAttention blocks to process two levels of precipitation data: general and extreme. The output conditions a UNet-based diffusion to produce prediction maps enriched with weather front information. The MicroDynamic model further refines the results to capture micro-scale variability. Extensive experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our DuoCast, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ph-w2000/DuoCast.