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Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

phys.org

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

#71

Post by efxhoy »

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.

This has been the case for years now, way before the AI craze. We just used to call it machine leaning. The best performing predictive models are black boxes which can’t practically be interpreted by humans the same way you can say a linear regression model that gives easily digestible parameters as output. Boosted trees are a great example of very well performing models that quickly become impossible for humans to understand once they get big enough to be useful.

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

#72

Post by throwway120385 »

rtsil wrote: post #11
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #5

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 know nothing about weather, but aren't changes happening gradually instead of overnight? There's no major anomaly that appears all of a sudden. In which case we can assume the every new change will be incorporated in the AI model's training.

They happen pretty quickly sometimes in the PNW. The bomb cyclone we had in November developed within a day and wasn't very well predicted in advance.

You can get a lot of traction with your assumptions but it's that 2-3% of predictions where being accurate matters a lot.

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

#73

Post by kolinko »

Always42 wrote: post #15

Based on the Gemini release it’s hard to take what Google claims at face value.

Their Alpha* work from DeepMind is actually quite good and has a good track record. LLM/Gemini - yeah, what you said, I wouldn't trust a word their team says.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

joe_the_user wrote: post #70
raincole wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But AI models in no way free you from work and they are hardly relaxing. If anything, they "free" people from understanding but that's an activity that many if not most people value highly.

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by wongarsu »

dartos wrote: post #60
adriancooney wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can always work backwards, regardless of AI.

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.

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

#76

Post by diego_sandoval »

n4r9 wrote: post #57
BadHumans wrote: post #56

I'm friends with a meteorologist and the 15+ day forecast is the bane of their existence because you can't accurately forecast beyond a week so I would love to know how they are measuring accuracy. The article doesn't say and I know the paper is going to go over my head.

I would guess that everyday they're comparing the current weather against the forecast from 15 days ago. Not a lot of data points to be sure, but perhaps enough to have confidence of very high accuracy.

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.

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

#77

Post by jacobgkau »

joe_the_user wrote: post #70
raincole wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But AI models in no way free you from work and they are hardly relaxing. If anything, they "free" people from understanding but that's an activity that many if not most people value highly.

I think that might have been their point. People moving work to AI so they can "relax" by working on more complicated technical matters (or more AI) are the businessmen, and the meteorologists just chilling out predicting the weather as best as they can with science are the fishermen.

Edit: Just saw their reply to you, so maybe I was wrong about the parable coming across wrong.

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

#80

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

BadHumans wrote: post #56

I'm friends with a meteorologist and the 15+ day forecast is the bane of their existence because you can't accurately forecast beyond a week so I would love to know how they are measuring accuracy. The article doesn't say and I know the paper is going to go over my head.

They're testing it on 2019 data. From the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9):

>> We use 2019 as our test period, and, following the protocol in ref. 2, we initialize ML models using ERA5 at 06 UTC and 18 UTC, as these benefit from only 3 h of look-ahead (with the exception of sea surface temperature, which in ERA5 is updated once per 24 h). This ensures ML models are not afforded an unfair advantage by initializing from states with longer look-ahead windows.

See Baselines section in the paper that explains the methodology in more depth. They basically feed the competing models with data from weather stations and predict the weather in a certain time period. Then they compare the prediction with the ground truth from that period.

Plot twist: they measure accuracy in predicting the weather 5 years in the past.

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