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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

#131

Post by hammock »

raincole wrote: post #66
atonse wrote: 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.

A fisherman was relaxing on a sunny beach, enjoying the day with his fishing line in the water. A businessman, stressed from work, walked by and criticized him for not working harder. "If you worked more, you'd catch more fish," the businessman said. "And what would my reward be?" asked the fisherman with a smile. "You could earn money, buy bigger nets, and catch even more fish!" the businessman replied. "And then wh…

This is a true story and why they have never built a bridge between Sicily and Italy even after thousands of years.

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

#132

Post by daemonologist »

queuebert wrote: post #82

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.

Apple killing Dark Sky is one of my major peeves.

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

#133

Post by genewitch »

Ankaios wrote: post #128

Turns out the Google AI's 15-day forecasts are for the weather in Mountain View. Which I can forecast 15 days out, too.

haha, one of the few times my gut reaction to something on HN was dead on.

"The easiest job in the world is the weatherperson in San Diego... And now, Ryan, what's the weather going to be like today?'

'uh, nice. back to you!'"

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

#134

Post by genewitch »

mnau wrote: post #93
diego_sandoval wrote: post #76

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…

2013 was a bad year for h1n1 or whatever it was. It killed my sister while she was vacationing back east. I think it was aggressive but it was quite cold that winter and that may have completely screwed with their data/interpretation at that time. For instance, it snowed 5 times and stuck in Central Louisiana that winter (continuing into frebruary/march, whateer.. It's been colder since, but that year was a real outlier (in my experience on earth, this is my supposition, i have been trying to figure this out for 11 years)

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

#136

Post by space_oddity »

genewitch wrote: post #133
Ankaios wrote: post #128

Turns out the Google AI's 15-day forecasts are for the weather in Mountain View. Which I can forecast 15 days out, too.

haha, one of the few times my gut reaction to something on HN was dead on. "The easiest job in the world is the weatherperson in San Diego... And now, Ryan, what's the weather going to be like today?' 'uh, nice. back to you!'"

San Diego weather forecasting is the meteorological equivalent of being on cruise control

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

#137

Post by space_oddity »

atonse wrote: 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.

With AI we risk treating the system like a black box

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

#138

Post by genewitch »

memco wrote: post #88
encoderer wrote: post #86

I recently read that the 10 day forecast now is as accurate as the 5 day forecast from 30 years ago when I was a kid. This surprised me. I grew up in Ohio and now I live in the Bay Area and the forecast here seems to be accurate only 2-3 days out. It would be so helpful to have an accurate 10 day forecast.

This also surprises me. The weather app on my iphone has been atrocious with local same-day forecasts lately. It will say that the forecast for noon is sunny when it is 11:50 and dumping rain. It sometimes gets the overall idea that warmer or colder weather is coming sometime soon but it’s off by up to 2 days. I haven’t bothered to look for better sources, but it might be worth doing some research and comparison.

as mentioned elsewhere, weather.gov has accurate enough predictions for stuff like rain.

It's good enough that i can confidently claim on a wednesday that i need to leave some place before 16:30 because there's a storm coming that i saw on weather.gov the preceeding sunday or monday. and there's a 75% chance that it will be raining at 16:30. This may not sound impressive, but in Louisiana knowing when a storm system is coming as opposed to some rain is probably pretty taxing on weather models; and is nearly universally good information to have.

I find i can't rely on the temperature and humidity readings, the "local prediction center" is in a concrete jungle (near an "international" airport, to boot), and "town" is consistently 7 degrees warmer than where i reside. Other than that, if it says temp below 32, it will freeze. if there's a heat advisory, we feel it too, just less so than town 20 miles away.

Hope this helps, and i hope other countries/regions do this as well as weather.gov - it just works! I do use ventusky for tropical system paths and the like, if the gov site allcaps weather briefing doesn't give me enough detail

my android phones always say "30c", no matter what settings i change - the built in weather thing is just broken.

As far as phone apps go, i don't know any good weather ones. I've never used ventusky on a cellphone, either.

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

#139

Post by genewitch »

dagw wrote: post #48
giarc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Great, so it's using historical data to make a prediction about what has already happened. That's ok though because it doesn't know it's acting on old data. Researchers would give it data and ask for the 15 day forecast, the researchers then compare against that real world data. And as noted, "it surpassed the centres forecast in more than 97 percent" of those tests. This is all referred to as backtesting.

I wish these sort of papers would focus more on the 3 percent that it got wrong. Is it wrong by saying that a day would have a slight drizzle but it was actually sunny all day, or was it wrong by missing a catastrophic rain storm that devastated a region? I've worked on several projects trying to use AI to model various CFD calculations. We could trivially get 90+ percent accuracy on a bunch of metrics, the problem i…

i was using scikit-learn or some other scaffolding/boilerplating similar software for doing predictions and i hate massaging data so i just generated primes and trained it on the prime series to like 300 or 1000, then had it go on trying to "guess" future primes or assert if a number was prime or not that it had seen before

and hilariously it was completely wrong (like 12% hit rate or something). I complained online and i forget the exact scope of my lack of understanding but suffice to say i did not earn respect that day!

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

#140

Post by genewitch »

wslh wrote: post #24

I really wonder if, like the weather, we should see new financial prediction models, understanding that there is randomness but also patterns.

there probably already is, and it's deployed with a kill-switch one would hope at the HFT firms.

I don't have any insider knowledge but i'm pretty sure that one Quant group that everyone knows about probably figured out most of the "tricks" used to get llms and SD to really take off a decade before anyone else. iirc they consistently get like 30% or greater returns, which is practically black magic and means that they have something that can see a pattern(s) in the data.

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