AI couldn’t forecast the Texas floods
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Some meteorologists say that could change. AI weather models are starting to exhibit an ability for deep learning of atmospheric physics, which means they could be capable of forecasting unprecedented weather events based on atmospheric conditions.
New AI models are "certainly capable of predicting ‘out-of-sample’ events — events that they haven't seen before,” said Corey Potvin, a scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.
But looming budget cuts at NOAA — along with years of lagging federal investment in AI weather systems — are a major hurdle for the improvement of federal AI weather models, experts say. It's the latest example of how President Donald Trump's efforts to shrink government could hobble the country's weather forecasting capabilities, at a time when extreme weather is on the rise.