It’s one of the oldest running jokes in history. The idea that the weather man is going to get their prediction wrong. Or nowadays that the absurdly hot Latina weather woman is going to get her forecast wrong.
Usually its no fault of their own. The weather is hard to predict and could change at a moment’s notice. Our predictions are only as good as the data we collect and when dealing with weather pattens on a global scale there’s a lot of fast moving data to calculate. But we may soon have an AI that could help us make more accurate predictions. Even when it comes to air pollution.
Phys.org explains:
“A team of computer scientists at Microsoft Research AI for Science, working with a colleague from JKU Linz, another from Poly Corporation, and another from the University of Amsterdam, has built what Microsoft describes in its press release, as a ‘cutting-edge foundation model’—a system called Aurora that can be used to make global weather and air pollution level predictions more quickly than traditional systems.
Conventional computer-based weather prediction systems typically run on supercomputers because they rely on mathematical formulas that crunch massive amounts of data. More recently, several groups (such as DeepMind and Nvidia) have taken another approach: using AI-based applications that take far less time to run.
In this new effort, Microsoft, working with its research partners, has developed a weather prediction system that it claims rivals traditional systems but takes only minutes to run—and it can predict global air pollution levels as well.
Called Aurora, the system uses 1.3 billion parameters and was trained using millions of hours of data from six climate and weather models. It can make 10-day predictions for any part of the world. It can also be used to predict the size and severity of unique weather events, such as hurricanes.
Microsoft describes it as a system made with ‘flexible 3D Swin Transformers, with Perceiver-based encoders and decoders.’ The technology allows it to use a wide variety of atmospheric data, such as wind speed, air pressure, temperature and even greenhouse gas concentrations. And that, the researchers claim, allows the system to discover patterns that would not be seen otherwise—patterns that can lead to predictable outcomes.
Unique among its capabilities is Aurora’s ability to predict air pollution levels for any given urban area around the world—and to be able to do it so quickly that it can serve as an early warning system for places that are about to experience levels of dangerous pollutants.”
Personally, I love the name Aurora. Referencing the natural phenomeon it’s perfect for a weather based system. I just hope that it actually works. More accurate weather forecasts isn’t just a nice to have. With the climate changing and there being more hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods, forest fires, atmostpheric rivers, polar vortexes, and other fast moving extreme weather events popping up we need more accurate information to help us warn people if they’re in risk and if the air outside is even breathable and not just let them know if they need to bring an umbrella or wear a hat.
With Aurora being x5000 faster than a supercomputer at making predictions we might finally have it.
Is Aurora the Greatest Idea Ever?
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