101–110 of 119 posts
The secret sauce to making accurate forecasts at 300 meter resolution has to be something more than “AI” right? I mean, there’s little reason to think AI should be meaningfully better at filling in details at 300m resolution than it would be at picking lottery numbers, no? Am I thinking about this wrong?
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One of the interesting things the model captures at this resolution is the dynamics of the wind going in the bay through the golden gate. See for instance: https://sf.atmo.ai/wind@37.80911,-122.44543,11.68,36,0,16669...
The Global Forecast System (GFS), i.e. the model presently used at NCEP, has a grid resolution of 18 miles (28 km). It is (has been, for years, actually), the second best global forecast system, right behind the European ECMWF (sometimes outperforming it, but on average slightly underperforming it, in terms of accuracy). I don't know how the ECMWF model works, but even as someone who did not study meteorology (but st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Global Forecast System (GFS), i.e. the model presently used at NCEP, has a grid resolution of 18 miles (28 km). It is (has been, for years, actually), the second best global forecast system, right behind the European ECMWF (sometimes outperforming it, but on average slightly underperforming it, in terms of accuracy). I don't know how the ECMWF model works, but even as someone who did not study meteorology (but st…
I would be curious how far DeepMind could get if they moved into this field. Would perfectly fit into the list of fields they turned upside down (or at least 45 degrees) in the recent years.
Numerical weather prediction is a _very_ well established field. In fact, large tranches of modern computer science and computing in general owe their existence in direct ways to the importance of numerical weather prediction, since this was one of the original applications of digital computers! Modern weather forecasting models are extraordinarily sophisticated scientific and engineering achievements. It's not obvious that AI actually offers any significant, immediate benefit over these tools save for niche, simplified forecasts (e.g. precipitation nowcasts) - certainly, given the prowess of modern NWP, the ROI is likely to be very low for research investments into general purpose AI weather forecasts.
One might then argue that perhaps AI can be useful to help refine or post-process these existing forecast systems? But of course - we've been doing just that since the 1970's. In fact, even the basic weather forecast that you might get from your national weather service these days is based on a sophisticated statistically post-processed machinery applied to not one but dozens of weather forecasts.
Weather prediction is unlikely to be a field where AI practitioners stumble across a significant improvement to the status quo. It would be far wiser to work closely with meteorology experts to solve practical and _useful_ weather forecast problems - like, is that thunderstorm I see on radar likely to produce a tornado in the next 45 minutes?
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Another anecdote: In the South of Germany at least, long stretches of sunny days are often followed by sudden thunderstorms with equally sudden bursts of rain. That "fact" had been so deeply ingrained in me that it was subconscious. You'd have a careful feeling if it was hot for too long, suddenly you might find yourself running for the next awning to escape the torrential rain. Sunny weather was a bit like building…
Midwestern USA has similar stretch of hot summer followed by thunderstorms.
How do you switch to normal (for 97% of humans) units for temperature and wind?
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Given this is in the SF bay there a number of high quality observations that you can use to validate the forecast skill (unlike India and Africa). I have not bothered doing this here since… well that’s too much like my day job. I’m always excited to see new forecast products, generally. If I were to guess (as an above comment did) it looks like they are applying some dynamic downscaling on top of either a custom WRF…
The website claims to be using DL which may mean less of a model-centric approach? The expertise of the people at the top of the organization, on this problem, seems a little thin, TBH. And, no stated validation results at all? Without such details, this is just marketing. It would be interesting to see how this behaves for longer prediction times and across a range of difficult forcing conditions off the ocean in th…
Growing up in Germany, before I moved to the Bay Area, I was wondering why weather apps and widgets were so prolific. Sure, knowing the forecast for next weekend was nice, but for anything closer I'd just get out of bed and look out of the window. That would pretty much tell me what weather it is, and it would usually change just slowly over a few days or so. Then I moved to the Bay Area, and weather does not only ch…
Another anecdote: In the South of Germany at least, long stretches of sunny days are often followed by sudden thunderstorms with equally sudden bursts of rain. That "fact" had been so deeply ingrained in me that it was subconscious. You'd have a careful feeling if it was hot for too long, suddenly you might find yourself running for the next awning to escape the torrential rain. Sunny weather was a bit like building…