GenCast, Google's new AI weather prediction tool outperforms the best, can accurately predict hurricanes

This comes at a time when natural chaos in Earth’s atmosphere means that all weather forecasts, including the two-week type, becomes less reliable over time.

GenCast, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool by Google's DeepMind is now capable of devising 15-day weather forecasts, outperforming the world’s best forecasts meant to track deadly storms and save lives, according to a New York Times report.

Google's GenCast outperformed the forecasts of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 97.2% of the time (Representational Image/Pixabay)

At the moment, the world leader in atmospheric prediction is the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

DeepMind tested GenCast against the center’s Ensemble Prediction System which is a service that 35 nations rely on to make their weather forecasts. They compared their respective 15-day forecasts in predicting a set of 1,320 global wind speeds, temperatures and other atmospheric features.

The result was that GenCast outperformed the center’s forecasts 97.2% of the time.

Afterwards, the the agency decided to adopt some of its features.

This comes at a time when natural chaos in Earth’s atmosphere means that all weather forecasts, including the two-week type, becomes less reliable over time.

Mainstream weather forecasting uses room-size supercomputers which turn millions of global observations and calculations into predictions, while GenCast runs on smaller machines and studies the atmospheric patterns of the past.

It was trained on weather data curated by the European center from 1979 to 2018, which is 40 years.

This means the AI was trained using organised and factual data, rather than the internet with its confusing mix of facts, biases and fallacies

It gives probabilistic forecasts or a range of percentages for the likelihood of rain for example, in a specific region at a given day.

It can more importantly predict with great accuracy the paths of hurricanes, which annually take away thousands of lives and lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.

The bottomline is that GenCast is best suited to complement current methods rather than replace them, according to the report.

GenCast’s weather predictions will soon be posted publicly on Google’s Earth Engine and Big Query as well.