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GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

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101–110 of 310 posts

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#101
post #5

I live in an area which regularly has a climate differently then forecasted: often less rain and more sunny. Would be great if I can connect my local weather station (and/or its history) to some model and have more accurate forecasts.

There are models which take as input both global forecasts and local ones, and which then can transpose a global forecast into a local one. National weather institutions sometimes do this, since they don't have the resources to run a massive supercomputer model.

Interesting. So what I am looking for is probably an even more scaled down version? Or something that runs in the cloud with an api to upload my local measurements.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#102
If you live in a country where local, short-term rain / shower forecast is essential (like [1] [2]), it's funny to see how incredibly bad radar forecast is.

There are really convenient apps that show an animated map with radar data of rain, historical data + prediction (typically).

The prediction is always completely bonkers.

You can eyeball it better.

No wonder "AI" can improve that. Even linear extrapolation is better.

Yes, local rain prediction is a different thing from global forecasting.

[1] https://www.buienradar.nl [2] https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/service-und-publikationen/...

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#104
Beyond the difficulty of running calculations (or even accurately measuring the current state), is there a reason to believe weather is unpredictable?

I would imagine we probably have a solid mathematical model of how weather behaves, so given enough resources to measure and calculate, could you, in theory, predict the daily weather going 10 years into the future? Or is there something inherently “random” there?

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#105
post #104

Beyond the difficulty of running calculations (or even accurately measuring the current state), is there a reason to believe weather is unpredictable? I would imagine we probably have a solid mathematical model of how weather behaves, so given enough resources to measure and calculate, could you, in theory, predict the daily weather going 10 years into the future? Or is there something inherently “random” there?

Small changes in initial state can lead to huge changes down the line. See: the butterfly effect or chaos theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#106
post #104

Beyond the difficulty of running calculations (or even accurately measuring the current state), is there a reason to believe weather is unpredictable? I would imagine we probably have a solid mathematical model of how weather behaves, so given enough resources to measure and calculate, could you, in theory, predict the daily weather going 10 years into the future? Or is there something inherently “random” there?

[deleted]

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#107
post #104

Beyond the difficulty of running calculations (or even accurately measuring the current state), is there a reason to believe weather is unpredictable? I would imagine we probably have a solid mathematical model of how weather behaves, so given enough resources to measure and calculate, could you, in theory, predict the daily weather going 10 years into the future? Or is there something inherently “random” there?

AFAIK there's nothing random anywhere except near atomic/subatomic scale. Everything else is just highly chaotic/hard-to-forecast deterministic causal chains.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#108
post #104

Beyond the difficulty of running calculations (or even accurately measuring the current state), is there a reason to believe weather is unpredictable? I would imagine we probably have a solid mathematical model of how weather behaves, so given enough resources to measure and calculate, could you, in theory, predict the daily weather going 10 years into the future? Or is there something inherently “random” there?

What you're describing is effectively how climate models work; we run a physical model which solves the equations that govern how the atmosphere works out forward in time for very long time integrations. You get "daily weather" out as far as you choose to run the model.

But this isn't a "weather forecast." Weather forecasting is an initial value problem - you care a great deal about how the weather will evolve from the current atmospheric conditions. Precisely because weather is a result of what happens in this complex, 3D fluid atmosphere surrounding the Earth, it happens that small changes in those initial conditions can have a very big impact on the forecast on relatively short time-periods - as little as 6-12 hours. Small perturbations grow into larger ones and feedback across spatial scales. Ultimately, by day ~3-7, you wind up with a very different atmospheric state than what you'd have if you undid those small changes in the initial conditions.

This is the essence of what "chaos" means in the context of weather prediction; we can't perfectly know the initial conditions we feed into the model, so over some relatively short time, the "model world" will start to look very different than the "real world." Even if we had perfect models - capable of representing all the physics in the atmosphere - we'd still have this issue as long as we had to imperfectly sample the atmosphere for our initial conditions.

So weather isn't inherently "unpredictable." And in fact, by running lots of weather models simultaneously with slightly perturbed initial conditions, we can suss out this uncertainty and improve our estimate of the forecast weather. In fact, this is what's so exciting to meteorologists about the new AI models - they're so much cheaper to run that we can much more effectively explore this uncertainty in initial conditions, which will indirectly lead to improved forecasts.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#109
post #88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO a chaotic system will not allow for long-term forecast, but if there is any type of pattern to recognize (and I would assume there are plenty), an AI/ML model should be able to create short-term prediction with high accuracy.

Not an expert, but "Up to 10 days in advance" sounds like long-term to me ?

To be clear: With short-term I meant the mentioned 6 hours of the article. They use those 6 hours to create forecasts for up to 10 days. I would think that the initial predictors for a phenomenon (like a hurricane) are well inside that timespan. With long-term, I meant way beyond a 14-day window.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#110
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good explanation. Now that both the 24-hour regional and 10-day global models have been announced in technical/research detail, I supposed there might still be a general blog post about how improved forecasting is when you search for "weather" or check the forecast on Android.

IIRC the MetNet announcement a few weeks ago said that their model is now used when you literally Google your local weather. I don't think it's available yet to any API that third party weather apps pull from, so you'll have to keep searching "weather in Seattle" to see it.

It's also used, at least for the high resolution precipitation forecast, in the default Android weather app (which is really part of the "Google" app situation).
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