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Title: Google's New Hurricane Model Was Breathtakingly Good This Season

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/05/0031...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Although Google
DeepMind's Weather Lab only started releasing cyclone track forecasts in
June, the company's AI forecasting service performed exceptionally well. By
contrast, the Global Forecast System model, operated by the US National
Weather Service and is based on traditional physics and runs on powerful
supercomputers, performed abysmally. The official data comparing forecast
model performance will not be published by the National Hurricane Center for
a few months. However, Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University
of Miami, has already done some preliminary number crunching. The results are
stunning: A little help in reading the graphic is in order. This chart sums
up the track forecast accuracy for all 13 named storms in the Atlantic Basin
this season, measuring the mean position error at various hours in the
forecast, from 0 to 120 hours (five days). On this chart, the lower a line
is, the better a model has performed. The dotted black line shows the average
forecast error for official forecasts from the 2022 to 2024 seasons. What
jumps out is that the United States' premier global model, the GFS (denoted
here as AVNI), is by far the worst-performing model. Meanwhile, at the bottom
of the chart, in maroon, is the Google DeepMind model (GDMI), performing the
best at nearly all forecast hours. The difference in errors between the US
GFS model and Google's DeepMind is remarkable. At five days, the Google
forecast had an error of 165 nautical miles compared to 360 nautical miles
for the GFS model, more than twice as bad. This is the kind of error that
causes forecasters to completely disregard one model in favor of another. But
there's more. Google's model was so good that it regularly beat the official
forecast from the National Hurricane Center (OFCL), which is produced by
human experts looking at a broad array of model data. The AI-based model also
beat highly regarded "consensus models," including the TVCN and HCCA
products. For more information on various models and their designations, see
here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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