While generative AI tools that primarily amount to slop generators grab most of the attention in the artificial intelligence space there are occasionally some actually useful applications of the technology like Google DeepMind s use of AI weather models to predict cyclones. The experimental tool launched earlier this year suessfully to ide urate modeling of ricane Eas it ed gaining steam in the AtlanOcean earlier this month.

As Ars Technica first reported Hurricane Erin â 'which reached Category 5 status and caused some damage to the island of Bermuda parts of the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States â' provided Google DeepMind s Weather Lab with the first real test of its capabilities.

According to James Franklin former chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center it did quite well outperforming the National Hurricane Center s official model and topping several other physics-based models during the first 72 hours of modeling。It ulmately fall off a bit the longer the pretion ort ran but it still topped the conththe five-day forecast.

While Google s was impresvely urate in the first days of modeling it s the ter ones that are most important to experts per Ars Technica as days three thfive of the are the ones that offals count on to make decisions on cfor evacuation and other preparatory orts. Still it seems like there may be some promise in the possibility of AI-powered weather modeling â 'though the sample size here is pretty small.（英語）

Most of the gold ard modeling techused for storm pretion use physics-based pretion engines which essally try to recreate the of the atmosby factoring in things like idity air ure and temperature es to ate ha storm might behave。Google s model instead pulls from a massive amount of data that it was trained on including a “reanalysis dataset that reconstructs past weather over the entire Earth from millions of observations and a specialized database containing key information about the track intensity size and wind radii of nearly 5，000 observed cyclones from the past 45 years”..（英語）

According to Google it tested its model on storms from 2023 and 2024 and found that its five-day prediction managed to predict the path of a storm with more accuracy than most other models coming about 140 km or 90 miles closer to the ultimate location of the cyclone than the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ensemble model whis considered the most accurate model available. Now it can point to a storm that it tracked in real-time as proof of concept though there is no reason to think AI tools like this will completely displace the other approaches at this stage。