AI models ace their predictions of India’s monsoon rains
THE ECONOMIST
About 38m farmers received forecasts generated not by an NWP model, but by ones powered by artificial intelligence (AI) instead.
These work in a different way: rather than going to the trouble of trying to simulate, equation by equation, exactly what is going on in the atmosphere, they mostly make their predictions by comparing the patterns they see in weather data with previous, similar patterns in the historical weather records on which they have been trained.
The models aced their test. In some regions, they predicted when the rain would arrive 30 days ahead. They also forecast that rainfall would stall in the middle of the season—as it did, for 20 days—despite this not appearing in the NWP forecasts. Almost half of the farmers who paid attention to the messages later said that the information influenced their decisions on what to plant and when—though it is still too early to assess whether this will influence their eventual earnings.
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