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Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

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Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#111

Obviously this team knows way more about this donain than me but I have to ask, wouldnt this only be able to predict weather which is in line with past weather patterns/indicators? I can imagine a weather analyst might be able to see "between the data" and recognise when some anomaly might be brewing, but an AI model would not

I remember one time when I was at summit station on the Greenland ice sheet, one of the AI-driven weather models on Windy was predicting a physically impossible 40 degrees F (we were sitting on 3 km of ice, no way that can happen).

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#113

They can say what they want, but I get rained on by surprise rain more than I ever have in my life, now that I'm practically forced to use the built-in Google weather due to them and Apple catching and killing all the good weather apps.

https://www.weather.gov/

It you are in the US and while it still exists. (I found out about it when private weather companies were mad they were giving out forecasts for free.. )

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#114
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but with this new predictive model we will have better predictions to work backwards from. OC was saying (I’m going to paraphrase) that this is the death of understanding in meteorology, but it’s not because we can always work backwards from accurate predictions.

Or we could wait 15 days and work backwards from what the weather actually turned out to be. I guess there could be some value in analyzing what inputs have the most and least influence on the AI predictions.

Comparing the difference between correct predictions and incorrect predictions, especially with a high accuracy predictive model, could give insight into both how statistical models work and how weather works.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#115
post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

In Australia, meteorologists used to be deployed across the country to local offices and would receive computer-generated forecast models (and other raw data) whenever the supercomputer at headquarters had finished running a job. The local meteorologists would then be allowed to apply their local knowledge to adjust the computer-generated forecast.

This was (and still is) particularly important in situations such as:

* Fast moving weather systems of high volatility, such as fire weather systems coupled with severe thunderstorms.

* Rare meteorological conditions where a global model trained on historical data may not have enough observed data points to consider rare conditions with the necessary weighting.

* Accuracy of forecasts for "microclimates" such as alpine resorts at the top of a ultra-prominent peak. Global models tend to smooth over such as an anomaly in the landscape as if the landscape anomaly was never present.[1]

It'd perhaps be possible to build more local monitoring stations to collect training data and run many local climate models across a landscape and run more climate models of specific rare weather systems. But it is also possibly cheaper and adequate (or more accurate) to just hire a meteorologist with local knowledge instead?

[1] Zanchi, M., Zapperi, S. & La Porta, C.A.M. Harnessing deep learning to forecast local microclimate using global climate data. Sci Rep 13, 21062 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48028-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48028-1

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#116
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's necessary. You can do a backtest for any point in the past, as long as you only use the data that was available until 15 days before the day being predicted.

So do they say. I am reminded of Google Flu Trends [0]. They likely also did similar "verification" and it didn't work. > The initial Google paper stated that the Google Flu Trends predictions were 97% accurate comparing with CDC data.[4] However subsequent reports asserted that Google Flu Trends' predictions have been very inaccurate, especially in two high-profile cases. Google Flu Trends failed to predict the 2009…

Disclaimer I work at Google.

One of the difficulties with using user data to understand society is that the company isn't a static entity. Engineers are always changing their algorithms for purposes that have nothing to do with the things you're trying to observe. For Google Flu Trends specifically here's a great paper

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/0314policyforumf...

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#117
post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

This whole article smells like marketing and a way to monetize their weather model. I hope its leaps and bounds beyond current capability but I have very strong doubts about its efficacy in the real world.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#118
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climatologists can, at least. Can they scrutinize the esoteric ensemble of weights making up this AI model? And which type of model's going to be easier to update based on changing climate parameters, a climate model or an AI model?

Weather and climate models have their own physics, which at the very least means that the solution is physical for the universe that particular model inhabits. The boundary conditions are parameterized, and those can be tweaked as climate and land use changes. AI models don’t have any of that, but they are actually more akin to human forecasters, gaining forecast skill from pattern recognition. I think there’s a plac…

> Weather and climate models have their own physics, which at the very least means that the solution is physical for the universe that particular model inhabits. The boundary conditions are parameterized, and those can be tweaked as climate and land use changes.

That really isn't true these days. The dynamical cores and physics packages in numerical weather prediction models and general circulation models have more-or-less converged over the past two decades. For instance, you'll find double-moment microphysical schemes in a cross-section of both classes of models, and slightly specialized versions of full-fledged GCMs can be be run within assimilation frameworks to generate true-blooded weather forecasts.

> AI models don’t have any of that, but they are actually more akin to human forecasters, gaining forecast skill from pattern recognition

This grossly sells short what the current crop of AI weather models is capable of, and how they're formulated. It's best to think of them as "emulators" of their physics-based cousins; they're trained to reproduce the state transitions from t=t0 to t=t0+delta_t that an NWP system would generate. It's a bit reductive to call this "pattern matching", especially when we increasingly see that the emulators recover a fair bit of fundamental dynamics (e.g. Greg Hakim's work which reproduces idealized dycore tests on AI-NWP models and clearly demonstrates that they get some things surprisingly correct - even though the setups in these experiments is _far_ from real-world conditions).

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#119
post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

do you want a causal weather model or one that can predict the weather well?

The current crop of AI weather models captures a surprisingly robust array of "core dynamics". E.g., recent work by Hakim and Masanam [1] reproduce classic dynamical core test cases on AI weather models and show that in many cases they robustly capture the expected dynamical responses to these highly idealized setups - setups far outside the bounds of what the models are trained on. What this means is that the causal or dynamical mechanisms producing a particular flow regime can very directly be inferred from the model.

[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/aies/3/3/AIES-D-2...

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#120
post #83

Can we extract the latent understanding it has? Would be really cool to convert it's predictive model into a computer program that predicts written in like python/C/rust/whatever, and I think that would better serve our ability to understand the world.

We don't need to; dynamical meteorology is an incredibly mature field and our understanding of the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere grossly exceeds the resolutions and limitations of coarse, 0.25 degree global numerical models.
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