Microsoft Says Its Aurora AI Can Accurately Predict Air Quality, Typhoons (techcrunch.com) 10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of Microsoft's latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.
AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.
While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.
AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.
While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.
Great! (Score:2)
A new software Nostradamus is born, from the company that's known for the safest, most reliable and bugfree software ever.
Re: Rules of thumb... (Score:1)
Isn't it an attention mechanism, counting co-occurrences of phenomena at long range in time and space?
Re: (Score:2)
AI doesn't use rules, normal models use those, and they already do break when something critically important needs to be accurate.
Hmm (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Bill Gates didn't suck off Trump, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that was a job he left to his CEO.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. Unless the tech company wants to invest in weather satellites showing visible and IR weather patterns, aircraft to fly through hurricanes to gather pressure and wind speed data, ships to deploy ocean buoys to gather water temperature, and Doppler radar sites to gather ground weather data.
The National Weather Service (NWS) does more than just make predictions. They also gather all the data to feed into the weather models and archive the data for later analysis to improve their prediction models
Re: (Score:2)
The history engine has a problem (Score:2)
As climate change affects the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans, all that history will become worthless