Huawei Cloud team says AI model produces faster, more accurate weather forecasts
- Pangu-Weather found to be ‘10,000 times faster’ than the most powerful forecasting tool currently in use, according to researchers
- It can come up with forecasts in seconds, including humidity, wind speed, temperature, sea level pressure and disaster warnings
They say the model, called Pangu-Weather, can produce forecasts in seconds, including humidity, wind speed, temperature, sea level pressure and even disaster warnings.
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In a paper in peer-reviewed journal Nature on Wednesday, the team said their experiments had shown the model was “10,000 times faster” than the one used by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) – the most powerful weather forecasting tool currently in use.
Pangu-Weather focuses on medium-range forecasting. Unlike nowcasting, which provides a detailed description of the current weather across local areas, medium-range forecasting covers a period of up to two weeks and plays an important role in disaster prevention.
Until now, AI-based forecasting has been inferior to numerical weather prediction for medium- and long-term forecasts. That method represents weather conditions as little squares on a map and uses maths to figure out how they change from one state to another. But it is computationally expensive and time consuming.
“When a problem involves complex mathematical mechanisms, large amounts of data and it is hard for people to find specific solutions, we think this problem is very suitable for AI,” Dr Tian Qi, lead scientist on the Huawei Cloud project, said in an earlier statement.
He said meteorological research was a great field for AI to play a role in.