The American company IBM announced its cooperation with the US space agency NASA to launch weather and climate forecasting applications supported by artificial intelligence technologies.
IBM explained that the two institutions are combining their knowledge and skills in the fields of earth sciences and artificial intelligence, for the model, which they say will offer “significant advantages over current technology.”
She noted that her current “GraphCast” and “Forecast” models generate weather forecasts more quickly than traditional meteorological models.
IBM statement
IBM says: These models are not basic yet, but it is working to develop a more advanced model supported by generative artificial intelligence applications, to produce artificial intelligence simulators that make weather predictions based on sets of training data.
They indicated that these forms will be free; Because it also cannot encode the physics that is at the core of weather forecasting.
She stated that the main goal of these applications is to improve forecast accuracy for other climate applications, predict meteorological phenomena, derive high-resolution information based on low-resolution data, and determine conditions leading to everything from aircraft disturbances to forest fires.
NASA
The essential ingredient is data, which is something NASA has in abundance. To make NASA’s vast and growing data archive more accessible, IBM and NASA set out a year ago to build an open-source geospatial foundation model. Now available on Hugging Face, the model can help scientists estimate the extent of past floods and wildfires. IBM is also using the model to help map urban heat islands in the UAE and track reforestation in Kenya.
Encouraged by these results, IBM and NASA decided to branch out. A new foundation model aimed at making weather and climate applications faster, more accurate, and more accessible is now in the works. Other potential applications include helping climate experts infer high-resolution information from low-res data, identify conditions conducive to wildfires, and predict hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme events.
In September, IBM and NASA hosted a workshop to discuss their proposed roadmap for building a weather and climate foundation model. When finished, the model will be made open source and publicly available.
AI Foundation Model
IBM and NASA’s goal is to create a multimodal AI foundation model for weather and climate prediction that can be adapted to many downstream tasks with relatively few GPUs. AI experts at IBM will work closely with climate scientists and other domain experts at NASA to test and validate the model on seven applications, including 10-14 day weather forecasts and things like dust storms and aviation turbulence.
Once trained, the model will be made openly available on Hugging Face, making weather and climate modeling much more accessible to the global research community. This work is part of a larger effort by IBM and NASA to develop foundation models that can answer some of the most pressing questions about our changing climate and environment.
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