Experts confirm it: “AI still struggles to predict the true intensity of hurricanes”

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized weather forecasting in just a few years, and AI-based global weather models can now produce forecasts that rival some of the world’s best physics-based prediction systems.

Progress in AI-based weather forecasting is driven by three factors: the availability of vast amounts of weather data, major advances in AI models, and unprecedented computing power. Much of the debate focuses on improving AI for weather forecasting through new models or hardware, but data are crucial for these models.

Artificial intelligence has benefited on a global scale from decades of weather records covering the entire planet. These datasets contain millions of examples of how conditions evolve over time and under different atmospheric situations, allowing AI models to learn patterns in a way that would have been impossible just a decade ago.

The regional scale of weather forecasting

The world has experienced the rapid intensification of a large number of hurricanes, which have gone from relatively weak storms to destructive hurricanes in a matter of hours. One example is Hurricane Polo, which rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in 24 hours off Mexico’s Pacific coast on September 21, …….