Financial Times: “Weather forecasting takes big step forward with Europe’s new AI system”

While tech companies and meteorological offices around the world are already applying AI to the weather, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) said its operational model broke new ground by making global predictions freely available to everyone at any time.

This milestone will transform weather science and predictions, said Florence Rabier, director-general of ECMWF, an intergovernmental organisation. Making the AI Forecasting System operational produces the widest range of parameters using machine learning available to date.

An experimental version tested over the past 18 months showed the system was about 20 per cent more accurate on key predictions than the best conventional methods, which feed millions of worldwide weather observations into supercomputers and crunch them with physics-based equations.

The new European system could predict the track of a tropical cyclone 12 hours further ahead, giving valuable extra warning time for severe events, said Florian Pappenberger, ECMWF director of forecasts.

Clive Cookson

Improved weather forecasting with better accuracy and predictions over longer timespans seems like a genuinely positive application of machine learning, unlike the multiple pitfalls of generative AI. Google’s DeepMind announced similar results from its GenCast AI model recently – which incidentally was trained on historical weather data from the same ECMWF. Turns out European AI models are not that far behind as many Americans insist on fearmongering.

An AI forecast for Europe issued by ECMWF on Monday predicts temperature and winds on March 11 © ECMWF

This particular article caught my eye because I happen to use a weather app on my phone (Today Weather) where I can select the ECMWF as data source – in the premium version at least, which I upgraded to a couple of months ago during a sale. I have no idea whether the current public forecast from the ECMWF is based on this advanced AI model already – this article certainly seems to imply that – but I switched to it after reading this news. For now, I’m keeping a closer eye on the forecast to see how well it matches the actual weather (in terms of cloud cover and precipitation at least).