Scientists say fully AI-driven weather prediction system delivers accurate forecasts faster with less computing power

Credit: BBC

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The title of the paper is ‘End-to-end data-driven weather prediction’. Given doubts over the quality of existing temperature data, some of it subject to ‘adjustments’ or to being discarded altogether, can AI rely on such sources?
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A new AI weather prediction system, Aardvark Weather, can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems, according to research published in Nature.

Aardvark has been developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, providing a blueprint for a completely new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices, says Phys.org.

The weather forecasts that people rely upon are currently generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on bespoke supercomputers. Aside from daily usage, the development, maintenance and deployment of these complex systems requires significant time and large teams of experts.

More recently, research by Huawei, Google, and Microsoft has demonstrated that one component of this pipeline, the numerical solver (which calculates how weather evolves over time), can be replaced with AI, resulting in faster and more accurate predictions. This combination of AI and traditional approaches is now being deployed by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.

But with Aardvark, researchers have replaced the entire weather prediction pipeline with a single, simple machine learning model. The new model takes in observations from satellites, weather stations and other sensors and outputs both global and local forecasts.

This fully AI-driven approach means that predictions are now achievable in minutes on a desktop computer.

When using just 10% of the input data of existing systems, Aardvark already outperforms the United States national GFS forecasting system on many variables and it is also competitive with United States Weather Service forecasts that use input from dozens of weather models and analysis by expert human forecasters.

Full article here.
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Image credit: BBC