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The average person checks the weather forecast on their phone several times a day. One day soon you may be seeing a weather forecast generated by artificial intelligence — and it could improve the accuracy of modern weather forecasting. 

 describes how an AI weather forecast model from 

 significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods. The project called 

 bested the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance.

GraphCast’s forecast skill and efficiency are already competitive with traditional weather forecasting methods.

Here’s Google’s description of GraphCast and the study performance: 

Changing the face of weather forecasting? 

I’ve been making daily weather forecasts from computer models for four decades. There are two big developments that jump out here for me with the new AI machine learning approach. 

The first is that GraphCast’s machine learning application uses historical data analogs. This is a different approach to the commonly used process of feeding current weather conditions into a forecast model that predicts future weather patterns. The use of historical weather analogs could improve outcomes in many forecast situations.

The second notable development is the sheer speed of the AI forecast process. GraphCast is able to run these forecasts in about one minute. That’s magnitudes of scale faster than current weather forecast models that take hours to run. 

The ability to rerun these forecasts multiple times in just a few minutes could create a radical improvement in allowing models to incorporate and adjust to incoming changing weather data. This could vastly improve forecasts over just a few hours as initial conditions change.

It’s still early in the AI forecast process, but the skill shown so far is astounding. It’s quite possible that AI-generated weather forecasts could lead to a breakthrough in forecast speed and accuracy in the coming years.

We have seen tremendous advancements in weather forecast skill over the past 40 years during my weather forecast career. Today’s five-day forecast is as accurate as the three-day forecast 30 years ago. 

It’s going to be amazing to watch and see how much AI can improve weather forecasts and warnings over the next decade.

The big question is, can AI currently pronounce unusual Minnesota place names like Lac qui Parle County?

Weather and Climate News

Updraft® - Minnesota Weather News

Paul Huttner

Author

It’s still early in the artificial intelligence forecast process, but the skill shown so far is astounding. It’s quite possible that AI-generated weather forecasts could lead to a breakthrough in forecast speed and accuracy in the coming years.

Is AI coming to a weather forecast near you?

Go Deeper.

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