AI-driven weather prediction breakthrough reported - The Guardian

AI-driven weather prediction breakthrough reported
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www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/20/ai-a…

“This is a completely different approach to what people have done before. The writing’s on the wall that this is going to transform things, it’s going to be the new way of doing forecasting,” Turner said. He said the model would eventually be able to produce accurate eight-day forecasts, compared with five-day forecast at present, as well as hyper-localised predictions.

Dr Scott Hosking, the director of science and innovation for environment and sustainability at the Alan Turing Institute, said the breakthrough could “democratise forecasting” by making powerful technologies available to developing nations around the world, as well as assisting policymakers, emergency planners and industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts.

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I'd settle for detailed short term local rain forecast. It's such a huge application and as far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong!) nobody does it at all well.

  • Often ensembles are only run every 3 or 6 hours, so the predictions are needlessly out of date.
  • The ensembles have a very small number of runs (like less than 10) so you can't get a good estimate of probabilities.
  • Usually you can't get access to the raw data anyway and user facing sites dumb things down to a single number, so e.g. "it's going to drizzle all day" and "it's going to tip it down for half an hour at some point" are presented exactly the same. As are "it's either going to rain loads or not at all" and "it's definitely going to rain a bit".
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One of the few good uses of AI, and actual real use of generative AI. Predicting the next frames of a storm seeing things that previous algorithms and humans could not. This will honestly probably save lives with earlier detection.

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Not to undermine their work, but didn't Microsoft not already release Aurora Forecasting (a 1.5b model, which compared to models for text is rather small - those tend to start at 3B - which makes sense because there is also a lot less data to build a model on).

Anyway, I am happy to see competitors popping up, because NWP is hard enough already.

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paper (link without AWS tracking or "email attachment" url): https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00411

GitHub repo (no content yet): https://github.com/annavaughan/aardvark-weather-public/tree/main

This repo will contain code and weights used to run the Aardvark Weather model. This will be released to reviewers during the review period and will be publicly available on the completion of peer review. If you would like to be notified when the codebase becomes available please email […]

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.ml

I am skeptical to say the least.

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OP edited

If you are legitimately interested/believe in scientific rigor, then here is the research paper published in Nature Scientific Journal by the University of Cambridge:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08897-0

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Not convinced yet, but we will see

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.world

"make the technology available to developing nations around the world..."

--including the United States that just had it's president "cancel" the NOAA and our ability to predict, respond and plan for weather events as a nation.

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It's almost like the US is in a massive debt and cant afford its own existence.

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National debt doesn't work like consumer debt bud. Learn some economics. Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt.

Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

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…Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt…

That’s the damning thing: Any savings are going towards tax cuts for the already-wealthy…

…Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

…and then going out and buying an expensive car.

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Some people when faced with an overly simple explanation doubt their own understanding and try to see why experts and academics say otherwise.

Others assume they know better than the experts and everyone is an idiot but them.

Maybe you know a lot about a topic, and see others choose one of those paths when questioning your area of expertise.

Which kind of person do you want to be?

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None of the above.

I dont know shit other than the US having debt. You guys know more than me about macro economy.

But good job being rude.

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I'll acknowledge my comment was rude, you are expressing humility now that wasn't present in your original assertive message. You hopefully have a better understanding now.

This misinformation about national debt that you unintentionally spread is used by conservatives around the world to deny people services

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Love this. This is the kind of stuff sophisticated ML models were born to do!

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