SCIENCE LAB SERVERS : AI - HURRICANE FORECASTS

A.I. - fueled hurricane forecasts may be speeding up predictions. Last fall, three days before Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica, forecasters in the National Hurricane Center in Miami warned that the storm would strengthen rapidly from the least dangerous category to the deadliest.

After the judgment turned out correct - among many accurate predictions that center was able to make, during the unusually volatile storm - the forecasters attributed their success to artificial intelligence, which they incorporated earlier that year into their methodology.

Now, DeepMind, a Google unit that built the A.I. model, argues that the Melissa achievement was no fluke.

For a recent paper in Nature, Google's DeepMind's researchers analyzed hundreds of hurricane forecasts between 2023-2025. Their analysis demonstrates, they say, that their A.I. model can outdo other widely used prediction models by significant margins, effectively peering a day or more ahead of those other models.

'' It's a big deal,'' said Amy McGovern, a professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma who directs an A.I. weather institute and played no role in the research.

'' If you can tell people a day in advance aboout a major hurricane, they'll have more time to evacuate and prepare in theory saving lives and property.''

Kerry Emanuel, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, welcomed the A.I. advance but cautioned that knowledgeable individuals still had to make sense of what the smart machine conjures up.

!WOW! thanks William J Broad.