AI is rapidly getting better at weather forecasting

[John Clark]

Google's Deepmind reported in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature that they have developed an AI, called "GenCast", that is much better at making 15-day weather forecasts that are more accurate than anybody else can, and makes those superior predictions in minutes instead of hours while needing less computing power.

Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning 

Previously the best forecasts had come from the supercomputers at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, but GenCast beats them 97.2% of the time even when it's run on much smaller computers. Ilan Price, the head of the project said “I’m a little bit reluctant to say it, but it’s like we’ve made decades worth of improvements in one year. We’re seeing really, really rapid progress.” 

GenCast is consistently better than the European center at predicting where hurricanes are going to go but it still needs improvement at predicting changes in hurricane intensity, however Dr. Price said he is confident his team will soon improve GenCast so it's good at that too. 

Google has also said it will share GenCast online and make public its underlying computer code.

GenCast 

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