Artificial intelligence can save lives by predicting where a hurricane will hit land much sooner than traditional forecasting systems. A new Artificial Intelligence tool from Google DeepMind predicted where September's Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Canada three days ahead of existing methods, according to researchers.
Weather forecasts have become much more accurate over the decades, but AI's speed and ability to analyze past events to make predictions make it a game changer, scientists say.
An accurate weather forecast is useful for telling you what to wear when you go out in the morning, but more importantly it can warn us about extreme weather such as storms, floods and heat waves, giving communities crucial time to prepare.
However, traditional weather forecasts take large amounts of computing power.
They involve creating estimates of hundreds of factors including air pressure, temperature, wind speed and humidity at different levels of the atmosphere around the globe.
A new AI tool called GraphCast created by Google DeepMind outperforms the European medium-range weather forecast model, one of the best in the world, in more than 90% of these factors, according to a peer-reviewed paper by colleagues published by DeepMind in the journal Science.
GraphCast produces its predictions in less than a minute, using a fraction of the computing power of traditional forecasting methods, because it takes a very different approach. (A2 Televizion)
