“As Hurricane Melissa exploded into a category-5 storm over the weekend, scientists forecast its trajectory and growth with a powerful new tool — helping to inform warnings to Jamaica and other nations that the storm has devasted. That tool, an artificial intelligence (AI) forecast model developed by Google DeepMind, is successfully predicting how Melissa and other dangerous storms arise and evolve…

DeepMind’s developers trained the model on two data sets: a large database of global weather observations and a smaller database of observations that included nearly 5,000 cyclones from the past 45 years1. Adding that second, cyclone-specific database might be the reason that the DeepMind model performs better on hurricane forecasts than do other AI-based forecast models, Franklin says. In particular, scientists have long struggled to improve their forecasts of a storm’s intensity — but the DeepMind model seems to capture this well.”

From Nature.