An international team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research, and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts have developed a new AI model for weather prediction.
They call it Aardvark Weather, for reasons that escape us. According to its creators, Aardvark Weather can provide an “end-to-end AI forecasting system.”
Accurate weather prediction is critical for a range of human activities including transportation, agriculture, and industry. Oh yeah, and it’s really important for the safety of the general public. AI models have been improving weather prediction. They don’t require supercomputers. And they’re faster than models like the U.S. Global Forecast System, or GFS.
So what’s the problem? They still depend on traditional numerical systems to incorporate vast amounts of weather data.
The answer? Aardvark.
According to the Aardvark researchers, this single machine learning model can replace the entire numerical weather prediction (NWP) pipeline.
Writing in the journal Nature, the research team noted that Aardvark Weather produces high-resolution global and local forecasts, using data from satellites, weather stations, ships, and other sensors. Aardvark is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than current forecast models.
The researchers concluded, “We believe Aardvark Weather will be the starting point for a new generation of end-to-end models that will reduce computational costs by orders of magnitude, and enable rapid, affordable creation of customized models for a range of end-users.”
It all sounds like an exciting improvement in what is a vital worldwide endeavor. But don’t expect the US to take advantage of this technological advance in weather prediction – not with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under attack by DOGE. Apparently, unlike the rest of the world, the current administration does not view daily weather forecasts, monitoring and warning citizens about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and tsunamis as particularly important functions of government.
NOAA chief scientist Craig McLean commented, “People are silently watching the United States decline as a technological leader. America got to the moon, but our weather forecasts won’t be the greatest.”