AI giving us accurate Weather forecasts

AI giving us accurate Weather forecasts

Here in the UK we love to talk about the weather. Probably because it is usually so mince!

Mince being Scottish for crap. In the old days of TV, you always had a news broadcast followed by the weather forecast.

There is a joke here, if you want the weather to change in Scotland, then wait five minutes and it will oblige. There are days often in Spring when you can have all four seasons in a day.

The weather forecasts then, are what you take with a grain of salt. I mean where I am in Fife, we have had snow forecast umpteen times this winter...

How many snowfalls have we had?

0 zilch zip nada nothing is how many!

So why are weather forecasts so useless over here?

Fear not .... Help is on the way!

Intelligent weather forecasting

Lately there has been so much doom and gloom surrounding Artificial Intelligence, that it is great to see and hear about good use cases for AI.

Sad fact .... The National Institutes of Health estimates all air pollution is responsible for 6.5 million deaths every year globally.

When I lived in the South of Spain I saw first hand the destruction that wildfires can bring and knew friends who lost their house.

We can't deny climate change is happening. There are more and more fires and floods. Pollution is on the rise. Air quality in many places is a massive problem.

The side effects from this pollution range from irritating to the downright deadly. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifted as far as Portugal and Spain, and set off air quality alerts in cities across the United States and Canada.

People get stuffy noses, stinging eyes and it can hamper your breathing.

"We know that dangerous air quality levels are a significant threat, but because exposure happens slowly, over time it is more difficult to quantify," said Marisa Hughes, the climate intelligence lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and assistant manager of the Human and Machine Intelligence program.

"A more accurate, higher-resolution model can help protect populations by providing them with information about air quality over time so that they can better plan ahead."

That higher resolution model is exactly what was developed with the team developing deep learnign models which in short uses fewer iterations and develped way better results!

By training on a 1 year simulation the model has been accurately predicted 10-day forecasts that mirror ground truth data.

The ramifications of this are huge

If we actually get accurate forecasts in advance then people can prepare for weather accordingly!

Whereas traditional methods need a months worth of data these models are only needing 21 hours!

As in keeping with science breakthroughs the team have been presenting their findings most recently at the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fall Symposium, at the American Geophysical Union Conference and to the American Meteorological Society.

AI community pulling together

It has all been down to the advancements of the entire AI community in their efforts.

"If we tried the same thing five years ago, it might not have been as successful as it is today, because we're building on the momentum of this accelerating research," said Hughes. "We're sharing our results and starting to see what methods and architectures are effective when you apply them to different problems around the world."

Personally I think this is fantastic news and shows that rapid advancements in AI techology can have good uses for the world in general.

The next time you hear a weather forecast, see if you can predict how accurate it will be!

Reference Document:
Using artificial intelligence, better pollution predictions are in the air

All ramblings are from me, the mad Scotsman TengoLoTodo unless otherwise stated, note lead image is generated with AI on pixlr .com from a prompt by me.

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