Recent research shows artificial intelligence can help us to predict the weather. The system is called the nowcasting system developed by Scientists at Google-owned London AI lab DeepMind and the University of Exeter partnered with the Met Office.
In a traditional way, we use complex equations to forecast for only between six hours and two weeks’ time. The main global issue – climate change makes it difficult to make more accurate and reliable predictions for the weather. Sudden changes in the weather are caused by climate change. The decrease in the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator challenges our current methods to make accurate weather forecasts. This issue urged the meteorological institutes to develop their tools and methods to follow the changes.
So, there is a big problem that the traditional methods and their tools cannot provide the same performance for the society and community. If we cannot forecast critical storms and floods, it can have more dangerous catastrophic consequences. The recent news all around the world showed unexpected critical storms and floods can cause life losses. This can lead to bigger damage for the society, and to increase the financial costs.
Good news is that! The scientists claim that AI systems can be the solution for this problem! It can make more accurate short-term predictions, including for critical storms and floods.
The research, published in the journal Nature, claimed that meteorologists significantly preferred the AI approach to complete their methods. AI approaches can make the method more powerful by decreasing time for forecasters with predicting the continuous growing data. Instead they can spend more time focusing on gaining a better understanding of the implications for the forecasts. For this reason, the AI approach can help to mitigate the negative effects of climate change and prove better predictions for the people. So, it can potentially save lives!
Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58748934
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190322105718.htm
Very interesting post Mirrasul! I find it quite impressive to see that AI can potentially save lives here, in predicting potential natural disasters. This shows how far the development already is, and how much more we might be able to reach in the future. Thanks for bringing this interesting topic to my attention.
Wow! It’s a new insight for me. Not only do I believe this technology could save lives, but it could also benefit people whose jobs are heavily influenced by the weather, such as traditional farmers. A few months ago, I visited a village whose majority worked as traditional farmers in a developing country. They said that they suffered frequent crop failures because the weather has become so unpredictable that it is difficult to predict the weather. I think this technology could help them as well. In the future, I hope this technology could be used in many countries so that more people are protected and helped from the dangers and losses the climate change is causing.