Did Google Just Make Meteorologists Obsolete?

Well, this could be bad news for your station’s Meteorologists.

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.

TechCrunch reports that for decades, meteorology and weather forecasting have been largely defined by fitting observations into carefully tuned physics-based models and equations. That’s still true — there’s no science without observation — but the vast archives of data have enabled powerful AI models that cover just about any time scale you could care about. And Google is looking to dominate the field from now to eternity.

At the short end of the spectrum, we have the immediate forecast, which generally is consulted for the question, “do I need an umbrella?” This is served by DeepMind’s “nowcasting” models, which basically look at precipitation maps like a sequence of images — which they are — and try to predict how the shapes in those images will evolve and shift.

With countless hours of Doppler radar to study, the model can get a pretty solid idea of what will happen next, even in fairly complex situations like a cold front bringing in snow or freezing rain.

This could be a game-changer….