Google says its new AI model outperforms the best weather forecasting system

Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an AI weather forecasting model this week called GenCast.

in Paper published in NatureDeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ENS) — apparently the best operational forecasting system in the world.

And in Blog postthe DeepMind team provided a more intuitive explanation of this technology: While its previous weather model was “deterministic, providing a single best estimate of future weather,” GenCast “comprises a set of 50 or more forecasts, each representing a likely weather event.” Track “, creating a “complex probability distribution for future weather scenarios.”

As for how it compares to ENS, the team said it trained GenCast on weather data up to 2018, then compared its forecasts for 2019, and found that GenCast was more accurate 97.2 percent of the time.

Google says GenCast is part of its suite of AI-based weather models, which it has begun integrating into Google Search and Maps. It also plans to release historical and real-time forecasts from GenCast, which anyone can use in their own research and modeling.