Physical sciences

Climate and weather

AI milestones in climate and weather, part of physical sciences.

2 milestones

GraphCast forecasts ten days of global weather in under a minute

Google DeepMind published GraphCast in Science on 14 November 2023. Trained on about forty years of reanalysis data, it predicts hundreds of atmospheric variables ten days ahead at quarter-degree resolution, and beat the European Centre's operational forecast on 90 per cent of 1,380 verification targets. A forecast that takes hours on a supercomputer takes it under a minute.

Pangu-Weather is the first learned model to beat operational forecasting

Bi and colleagues at Huawei Cloud published Pangu-Weather in Nature on 5 July 2023. Trained on 39 years of recorded atmospheric data, it was the first machine-learned model reported to beat the operational numerical forecast on accuracy as well as speed, producing a global forecast in about 1.4 seconds on one graphics processor.