Artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging as a faster and cheaper alternative for improving forecasts of extreme weather, but hurdles remain
Count weather forecasting among the numerous industries AI has the potential to transform.
Artificial intelligence is already helping improve forecasts of hurricane tracks, tornado potential, flood risk and other weather threats, but meteorologists are still wrestling with how to fully integrate AI models into daily forecasting and how much to trust the new predictions.
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“In the last 12 months, we have had a tsunami of demonstrations of different AI methods being used for forecasting across a wide variety of tasks and scales,” Amy McGovern, director of the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, said in an email. “People are really seeing the power of AI and realizing that it can be used to help forecasts.”
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But it’s still up for debate if and when AI models could become the primary tools used by meteorologists to make forecasts. Experts say it depends not only on how easily commercially developed AI models can be transitioned into operations but also whether they will be trusted and embraced by government agency leaders and forecasters.
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A novel approach to forecasting
Computer models first started to produce useful weather forecasts in the 1950s based on complex mathematical equations that describe the day-to-day evolution of the atmosphere. Running these models requires tremendous processing power, and upgrading them is an expensive process that can take years to complete. Meanwhile, new supercomputers, such as the one the U.K. Met Office purchased from Microsoft in 2021, can cost more than $1 billion.
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