AI churns out lightning-fast forecasts as good as the weather agencies ’
Meteorologists call it the “
quiet revolution
”: a gradual but steady improvement in weather forecasting. Today, the 6-day forecast is about as good as the 3-day forecast from 30 years ago. Rarely do severe storms or heat waves catch people unaware. This revolution has saved lives and money, but it also comes with a cost: billions of dollars’ worth of energy-hungry supercomputers that must run 24/7 just to produce a few forecasts a day.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now spurring another revolution within numerical weather prediction, as the field is known. In mere minutes on cheap desktop computers, trained AI systems can now make 10-day forecasts that are as good as the best traditional models—and in some cases even better. The world’s top weather agency, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), has
embraced the technology
: Last month it began to generate its own
experimental AI forecasts
. The algorithms could enable more frequent forecasts and free up computing resources for other thorny problems. “It’s very, very exciting to know we can generate global predictions that are skillful, really cheaply,” says Maria Molina, an AI-focused research meteorologist at the University of Maryland.
Some of the world’s
biggest
tech giants
are jockeying to claim the most skillful model, including Google DeepMind, which describes its GraphCast model
in
Science
this week
...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
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