AI churns out lightning-fast forecasts as good as the weather agencies’ | Science | AAAS

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

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 comp