Diffusion Precipitation Generation with Medium-range Weather Forecasting

Accurate daily precipitation forecasts are important for weather-sensitive decisions. Although recent Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) have achieved significant progress, they are trained on reanalysis data, which exhibit regional and intensity-dependent biases. Since retraining WFMs on observation-based targets is costly, we study Dynamics–Precipitation Decoupling, a plug-and-play framework that uses a separately trained generator to map non-precipitation forecasts from a frozen weather model to observation-aligned daily precipitation. Its key challenges are to capture heterogeneous rainfall distributions and align daily accumulations with atmospheric signals that evolve across space and time. To address them, we train a diffusion generator conditional on atmospheric states and satellite-gauge estimates of precipitation. A multi-scale recurrent encoder summarizes atmospheric evolution, while cross-attention aligns atmospheric and precipitation features during denoising. Extensive evaluation of various backbones, including Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, and HRES, on global and regional forecasting shows improved daily precipitation accuracy and event detection, with better representation of localized accumulation patterns. Global ensemble precipitation forecasting results demonstrate that our decoupling models outperform ENS and training-from-scratch GenCast. Remarkably, a heavy-rainfall case study using 2,288 stations in China further supports improved daily accumulation patterns and event detection against ground observations. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICLR2027-code-9B4C.