AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#2Like, looking for dark clouds in the sky? Is 2h impressive?
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#3This is a bit over-hyped and not exactly a breakthrough. It’s not doing true weather prediction but rather extrapolating the movement of radar images. This is nothing new. I remember as far back as the 1990s TV weathermen would draw a line across a line of moving rain and the computer would predict which town it would get to and when.
Slapping “AI” on this 25 years later is an good example of the whole present PR move of labeling things as “AI” that are just rather basic data analytics.
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#4I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window.
On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparently that helps to improve the accuracy of predictions when combined with other data.
No idea how good their algorithm is though, I don't generally look at the weather widget on my phone anyway since looking out of the window is faster and works well enough.
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#5I'd like to see a weather forecasting benchmark/comparison/competition that quantifies how much forecasting improved over the last few years
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#6Darksky models can tell you with great accuracy whether it’s going to rain in the next 10 mins and the % of precipitation.
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#7This is a bit over-hyped and not exactly a breakthrough. It’s not doing true weather prediction but rather extrapolating the movement of radar images. This is nothing new. I remember as far back as the 1990s TV weathermen would draw a line across a line of moving rain and the computer would predict which town it would get to and when. Slapping “AI” on this 25 years later is an good example of the whole present PR mov…
AI doing something that humans used to do but better is pretty much the whole point of AI.
The chasm between drawing a line on a map and this system is enormous, and represents 30 years of research.
It doesn't have to be a breakthrough to be in the news, it's a routine advancement of the state-of-the art.
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#8There isn't enough info in the article to know exactly what is happening, but the problem with most of these systems (my first attempt 10 years ago, or Dark Sky, others as well) is that they use existing rainfall and wind speed to make guesses about where the rain will move. They typically fail at making real weather predictions; new rain starting to fall is a simple example that is often missed by these kinds of predictions.
The article just says "maps" but doesn't say what the data is. Rainfall amount? Just rainfall or also wind maps? What other maps?
Curious to see how this works in reality. Most of these attempts can be impressive sometimes, but fail often enough to make it not reliable for real use. However I am extremely optimistic about the future of increasing weather prediction accuracy, including with AI models as well as traditional physics models.
We'll see I guess.
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#9I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparen…
Users correcting the weather in-app is a huge curiosity of mine. I first blogged about that like 8 years ago for a now-defunct project: http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/12/locally-crowdsourced-weat...
I have also re-implemented this feature in All Clear on Android [1]. My main lesson from all this so far is that it is useful and fun to collect and show the data, and real insights can be had by users seeing their peers' data, but incorporating the data into a model usefully is a bit more difficult! Making numerical predictions that actively use the user's weather data (rather than just showing 'x users say it is raining nearby even though the forecast says it shouldn't be') is much tougher.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
#10This is a bit over-hyped and not exactly a breakthrough. It’s not doing true weather prediction but rather extrapolating the movement of radar images. This is nothing new. I remember as far back as the 1990s TV weathermen would draw a line across a line of moving rain and the computer would predict which town it would get to and when. Slapping “AI” on this 25 years later is an good example of the whole present PR mov…
AI doing something that humans used to do but better is pretty much the whole point of AI. The chasm between drawing a line on a map and this system is enormous, and represents 30 years of research. It doesn't have to be a breakthrough to be in the news, it's a routine advancement of the state-of-the art.
No. Drawing the line on the map was just used to decide where you wanted to show the prediction for. The forward looking prediction models themselves have been around for decades.