AI Weather Models Promise Super Granular, Specialist Forecasts
The insurance industry is helping develop a new way to predict flooding down to the neighborhood level and warn communities.
Illustration: Petra Péterffy for Bloomberg Green
The weather forecasting industry has made big leaps in accuracy but has struggled with hyper-local predictions. But the proliferation of AI weather models in recent years means small, commercial firms are now developing the ability to rapidly make specialized predictions, like when and how much it will rain in your neighborhood or how much wind will blow to spin a turbine.
For decades, public agencies have run global weather models that require supercomputers to crunch complex physics equations to spit out predictions. The need for more granular forecasts is becoming more pressing as climate change increases the odds of extreme weather, and AI is poised to offer a cost-effective way to provide them.