John Wheeler: Artificial intelligence may soon take the human element out of weather forecasting

FARGO — Artificial intelligence is working its way into weather forecasting and will likely one day take over. An AI research lab in London called GoogleDeepMind has developed an intelligence software package called GenCast. This new AI software takes the latest output from the latest version of the world's best physics-based weather model, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and compares the past 40 years of actual weather to tweak the results.

Instead of a straight forecast, the output is a set of probabilities of the most likely weather outcomes. Essentially, the AI brain is doing what human weather forecasters do at present, but with the potential to become much more accurate as the system is developed. Human weather forecasters are not able to consider and weight all possible variations and outcomes and so can miss details that can lead to errors in the forecast.



AI has the potential to do better. An article describing the development of GenCast was recently published in "Nature" magazine..