Artificial intelligence could mark a before and after in the weather forecast, which today is an indispensable tool of daily life. This not only helps you know whether or not you should go outside with an umbrella, it is also a support for agriculture, aviation, outdoor events and weather emergency planning.
However, current tools still have a lot to improve on short-term predictions , although this could change very soon. DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Google, ensures that it has an artificial intelligence system that allows predicting whether it will rain in the next 90 minutes.
The company partnered with the UK meteorological department, the Met Office, to dramatically improve weather forecasting techniques using the Generative Deep Rain Model (DGMR).
DeepMind claims it can predict rain up to 2 hours in advance by analyzing the last 20 minutes of radar data. But the artificial intelligence model is also capable of providing even more accurate data. For example: how much it will rain, at what time of day it will, how long the phenomenon will spread and in what location.
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Artificial intelligence at the service of meteorology
In order to test the approach, 56 meteorologists from the Met Office were asked to rate the performance of DGMR. To do this, they made a blind comparison with another competitive tool that also uses artificial intelligence. 89% said they preferred the DGMR results.
“We were especially interested in the ability of these models to make predictions about medium to heavy rain events, which are the events that most impact people and the economy, and we show statistically significant improvements,” they say in DeepMind.
And if you wonder when this new model of weather forecasting with artificial intelligence will begin to be used, we must tell you that it is still too early to know. DeepMind believes that this approach provides an interesting alternative to traditional methods, but it is not yet without limitations .
The team is committed to continuing to work to further improve the accuracy of predictions in different scenarios. “Future work will require that we develop additional ways of evaluating performance and further specialize these methods for real-world applications,” they explain.
The collaboration between DeepMind and the Met Office is a good example of how artificial intelligence can be applied in a wide variety of settings. This is already present in Internet search, social networks, personal assistants, cybersecurity, vehicles and much more.
