The American internet company Google has unveiled the most accurate weather algorithm of all time: the Graphcast forecasting tool from Google’s DeepMind AI laboratories was fed with four decades of weather forecasts and was able to derive forecast models from them that allow it to look quite accurately into the future ten days into the future.
According to the Financial Times, historical data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) was used as training data. Following the analysis, ECMWF chief meteorologist Matthew Chantry admitted that progress in AI in meteorology was “much faster and more impressive than expected.”
How it works: Based on the state of the atmosphere and measurement data from around the world, a ten-day forecast is created within minutes based on the patterns recognized in the historical data. Unlike previous prediction models, which are calculated more slowly, this apparently does not even require a supercomputer.
Graphcast is not the first AI weather forecasting system: the American chip company Nvidia and the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei had previously experimented with such techniques. However, they did not come close to the prediction quality of the Google algorithm, which would exceed the ECMWF’s previous predictions in 90 percent of the measured values. It proved particularly accurate during extreme weather conditions.
Particularly impressive: according to Google, the ten-day forecasts were made on one processor – the chip was specially developed for AI applications. This underlines the high efficiency compared to supercomputers with thousands of processors working in parallel.
Source: Krone
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