Architecture-Dependent Utility of Variational Quantum Gates in Recurrent Weather Forecasting: A Controlled QGRU–QLSTM Evaluation

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Hybrid quantum recurrent models are commonly evaluated against compact classical networks, making it diffcult to determine whether observed gains arise from the variational quantum circuit (VQC) or from the surrounding recurrent architecture. This study presents an architecture and parameter-controlled evaluation of quantum gated recurrent unit (QGRU) and quantum long short-term memory (QLSTM) models for one-step-ahead meteorological forecasting. Each quantum model is compared with both a compact, approximately parameter-matched recurrent baseline and an exact classical gate-core surrogate that preserves the hidden width, recurrent equations, gate-specific pre-/post-projections, optimization protocol, and total trainable-parameter count. All models use 17 input features, 24-step histories, a chronological 80/10/10 train–validation–test split, trainingonly standardization, and ten matched random seeds. QGRU achieves an RMSE of 1.1045 ± 0.0693, reducing test RMSE by 19.01% relative to the compact GRU and by 5.47% relative to its exact 773-parameter surrogate. It also attains a lower mean best validation MSE, reaches 95% of its achievable validation improvement after 5.5 ± 0.5 epochs, and exhibits a smaller final train–validation gap. QLSTM reduces test RMSE by 24.80% relative to the compact LSTM, while its exact 1,025-parameter surrogate achieves comparable predictive performance with slightly greater validation stability. Analysis of 1,949 epoch-level records across convergence, checkpoint quality, early stopping, generalization, and runtime demonstrates that VQC utility depends on the recurrent architecture in which it is embedded. All experiments are conducted using ideal noiseless statevector simulation.</p>