World - Why AI Could Save Us From the Next Deadly Hurricane

There’s an old joke: The weatherman is the only job where you can be wrong 50 percent of the time and still keep your job. Meteorology has since improved a lot since that old chestnut was funny, but it still highlights a very real truth about weather prediction: It’s hard as hell.

Meteorologists need to track and account for multiple different variables ranging from temperature to humidity to air pressure, and many more. These conditions can range drastically from place to place, even if they’re within a few miles from one another. So predicting what the weather will be is like trying to hit a moving target that’s also changing shape, size, and consistency all at once.

Currently, one of the best and most common ways to predict weather is with numerical weather prediction. This is a method of using equations to simulate the physics and fluid dynamics of future atmospheric conditions. It’s an incredibly energy- and resource-intensive way of forecasting, often requiring very powerful computers to assist in the modeling.

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Read also (paywall applies)

How Big Tech AI models nailed forecast for Hurricane Lee a week in advance, The Washington Post / September 21, 2023

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Even with the advancement of supercomputers being used in meteorology, these predictions can still take days to simulate depending on how far out things are being forecasted. The accuracy of the predictions go down the further out it attempts to forecast. This often becomes a huge issue when we have looming natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes where data is needed sooner rather than later, and each second could mean the difference between people dying or surviving.

That’s why scientists have begun turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in weather forecasting. In two papers published July 5 in the journal Nature, researchers describe two new methods of creating highly accurate and fast weather predictions up to six days in advance. The approaches could speed up extreme weather forecasting by orders of magnitudes.

“AI offers new opportunities for numerical weather prediction,” Lingxi Xie, a senior researcher at Chinese tech company Huawei Inc. and co-author of one of the papers, told The Daily Beast in an email. “AI will not replace traditional methods, but will be integrated with them towards a hybrid forecast system.”

Xie added, “We advocate for meteorologists to embrace AI methods and the new opportunity so that we can together improve human weather forecasting skills.”

The first paper describes an AI model dubbed Pangu-Weather created by Huawei. This system can predict global weather patterns up to a week in advance. The model was trained using 39 years of global reanalysis weather data, which is a combination of historical observational weather data with forecasting models.

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