Nvidia unveils AI models for faster, cheaper weather forecasts

The models, which the AI chip firm announced at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Houston, are part of a broader push by the company to provide open-source software

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In the case of weather forecasting, Nvidia is aiming to replace expensive and time-consuming conventional weather simulations with AI-driven versions that the company said can rival or exceed the accuracy of older methods. The AI models, once trained, are also faster and cost less to run.

Mike Pritchard, the director of climate simulation research for Nvidia and a professor of earth system sciences at the University of California, Irvine, said that one of the practical business applications of the new weather models will be in the insurance industry. Insurance companies often want to understand extreme outlier events, such as massive floods or hurricanes.

But predicting such events in detail has historically been expensive, because weather forecasting is performed in “ensembles,” or groups of individual “member” predictions about how a weather event might play out from a given starting point. To find possible outlier events, the ensembles must contain many members, but calculating each one in precise detail to see whether a particular property might flood is slow.

“The tension is gone,…