Can AI help us predict extreme weather?

We’ve learned how to predict weather over the past century by understanding the science that governs Earth’s atmosphere and harnessing enough computing power to generate global forecasts. But in just the past three years, AI models from companies like Google, Huawei, and Nvidia that use historical weather data have been releasing forecasts rivaling those created through traditional forecasting methods.

This video explains the promise and challenges of these new models built on artificial intelligence rather than numerical forecasting, particularly as it relates to the ability to foresee extreme weather.

Here are the papers that describe the models mentioned in the video.

Google’s GraphCast: https://www.science.org/stoken/author...
Huawei’s Pangu-Weather: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
Nvidia’s FourCastNet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11214

Here is the announcement of the ERA5 dataset, released by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in 2020:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

We interviewed Dr. Aaron Hill over email for this video. Hill is involved in developing responsible AI for environmental science via AI2ES:
https://www.ai2es.org

Google has also developed a weather forecasting model called Nowcasting, which is already embedded in its weather products specifically for short-term precipitation forecasts:
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog...