GraphCast the weatherman

Photo: Besjunior / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)

First it was college essays, then law, now it's the weatherman thanks to DeepMind's GraphCast
and it's connect to all things related to weather.

Finally, a robot to tell you which jacket you should wear to the function. Google DeepMind, the search giant’s AI-centric brain trust, just announced a new weather forecasting model that beats traditional systems more than 90% of the time. Named GraphCast, the machine learning model promises 10-day predictions that are better, faster, and more energy-efficient than the tools that run your weather app today.

“We believe this marks a turning point in weather forecasting,” Google’s researchers wrote in a study published Tuesday.

Backgrounder

GraphCast starts with the current state of Earth’s weather, and data about the weather six hours ago. Then, it makes a prediction about what the weather will look like six hours from now. GraphCast then feeds those predictions back into the model, performs the same calculation, and spits out longer-term forecasts.

The Google team compared GraphCasts results to the current model that’s used for medium-range weather prediction, called HRES. According to the study, GraphCast “significantly” outperformed HRES on 90% of the targets used in the test.

GraphCast also had surprising success predicting extreme weather events including tropical cyclones and freak temperature changes, even though it wasn’t specifically trained to handle them.

Like the Terminator, it learns ...