1 School of Automation, Southeast University
2 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University
3 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University
4 School of Architecture, Tsinghua University
† corresponding author
Satellite-based radar retrieval methods are widely employed to fill coverage gaps in ground-based radar systems, especially in remote areas affected by terrain blockage and limited detection range. Existing methods predominantly rely on overly simplistic spatial-domain architectures constructed from a single data source, limiting their ability to accurately capture complex precipitation patterns and sharply defined meteorological boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose WaveC2R, a novel wavelet-driven coarse-to-refined framework for radar retrieval. WaveC2R integrates complementary multi-source data and leverages frequency-domain decomposition to separately model low-frequency components for capturing precipitation patterns and high-frequency components for delineating sharply defined meteorological boundaries. Specifically, WaveC2R consists of two stages (i) Intensity-Boundary Decoupled Learning, which leverages wavelet decomposition and frequency-specific loss functions to separately optimize low-frequency intensity and high-frequency boundaries; and (ii) Detail-Enhanced Diffusion Refinement, which employs frequency-aware conditional priors and multi-source data to progressively enhance fine-scale precipitation structures while preserving coarse-scale meteorological consistency. Experimental results on the publicly available SEVIR dataset demonstrate that WaveC2R achieves state-of-the-art performance in satellite-based radar retrieval, particularly excelling at preserving high-intensity precipitation features and sharply defined meteorological boundaries. Our project is available at https://spring-lovely.github.io/WaveC2R/.
Overall architecture of the proposed WaveC2R framework. (a) Stage I: Intensity-Boundary Decoupled Learning employs the Wavelet-Temporal-Frequency (WTF) module to extract hierarchical frequency-domain features from multi-source satellite observations and generates coarse radar estimates through frequency-decomposed optimization. (b) Stage II: Detail-Enhanced Diffusion Refinement progressively refines coarse estimates via conditional diffusion with physics-aware frequency-decomposed priors. (c) WTF Block demonstrates the core wavelet-based attention mechanism that performs temporal-frequency feature fusion across multiple scales.
Qualitative comparison of radar reflectivity predictions for four heavy precipitation events from the SEVIR dataset. Red boxes highlight magnified convective regions where our WaveC2R demonstrates superior intensity accuracy and boundary sharpness compared to competing methods. Input modalities include visible, dual-channel infrared, and lightning observations.
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