Environment Canada to use AI in new weather forecasting model (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 12 hours ago by ValueSubtracted@startrek.website to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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Environment Canada said that over the past year, its "scientists and meteorologists have been carrying out extensive testing on the hybrid model, running it in parallel with our traditional model to evaluate its performance for predicting weather conditions in Canada."

The department added it will continue to rely on its meteorologists, whose is judgment is "critical" to interpreting results and communicating them to the public.

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[-] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

It plans to launch a hybrid model this spring that uses both AI and traditional forecasting and says the combination of the two will lead to more accurate predictions.

Scientists for years have been using "AI" neural network models for approximating differential equations and parts of complex models. The transformer architecture is just the next step in that, which allows us to scale up training and get more capabilities out of neural nets.

As an example, Google just released TimesFM, which is an AI model for timeseries which is pretty cool

The reality is, when you're working with large scale physical models there are differential equations involved which no human can properly parameterize and implement based on raw theory alone. These models let us use large amounts of data to infill that step.