Microsoft Says Its Aurora AI Can Accurately Predict Air Quality, Typhoons (techcrunch.com) 21
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of Microsoft's latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.
AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.
While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.
AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.
While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.
Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
A new software Nostradamus is born, from the company that's known for the safest, most reliable and bugfree software ever.
Rules of thumb... (Score:1)
...the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches...
Yeah, but we don't know exactly the mechanism these models use. For all we know, it's a rule-of-thumb that often works, but breaks when something critically important needs to be actually accurate.
Re: Rules of thumb... (Score:1)
Isn't it an attention mechanism, counting co-occurrences of phenomena at long range in time and space?
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AI doesn't use rules, normal models use those, and they already do break when something critically important needs to be accurate.
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For all we know, it's a rule-of-thumb that often works,
Neural networks are basically all approximations of a curve in multidimensional space. If your dataset were small enough (or your computer were powerful enough), then you would just use Bayesian classification and get an exact answer.
Re: Rules of thumb... (Score:1)
Why were neural networks alone unable to provide the context sensitivity that the attention mechanism delivers?
Re: (Score:2)
Better a rule of thumb than nothing.
Hmm (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Bill Gates didn't suck off Trump, though.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that was a job he left to his CEO.
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Not really. Unless the tech company wants to invest in weather satellites showing visible and IR weather patterns, aircraft to fly through hurricanes to gather pressure and wind speed data, ships to deploy ocean buoys to gather water temperature, and Doppler radar sites to gather ground weather data.
The National Weather Service (NWS) does more than just make predictions. They also gather all the data to feed into the weather models and archive the data for later analysis to improve their prediction models
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Asked Gemini and it's pretty much everyone needs government as a basis for anything weather. [g.co]
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The history engine has a problem (Score:2)
As climate change affects the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans, all that history will become worthless
Re: (Score:2)
Book-banning is the Quigley/Hayes Code: No nudity, sex, homosexuality, racism, or drugs, only immigrant criminals.
Have you watched youtube lately? It censors a lot more than the Hayes code ever did.
Why can't we opt-out of this by default by law ? (Score:1)
Can it predict how pissed we are at getting force feed every possible bullshit AI out there with our privacy and copy rights getting eroded and robbed with no liability ?
When it is that we will "demand" that our lawmaker make being opt-out of every single AI crap a default, and that electronical devices such as mobile or computers have to stop sucking your privacy out by preventing and making illegal to pollute like a cancer, a device with stock application or services that you can't remove or disable, incl
WeatherNews is the most accurate (Score:2)
It's a fact that every one knows to be true like WinAmp whipping the llama's ass.
Accuracy And Range Of Vision (Score:2)
Accurate landfall prediction 4 days in advance is unimpressive by today's standards. In the last few years, we have repeatedly seen hurricane predictions with remarkable accuracy of path, landfall location, strength fluctuations, as early as 10 days in advance. Four days a a sad relic of prior decades.
Call it AI, or models, or whatever you want, but the currently used predictions are amazing. I think that the most accurate ones that I've seen are coming from Barron Weather. But, I'm not positive about this.
air quality? (Score:2)