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AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time
- Gys 5y agoIn the Netherlands there is buienradar.nl which also uses radar images to predict rain fall accurately. Already for more then 10 years. Before an algorithm was called ‘AI’ ;-)
- dagw 5y agoDid you read the paper? It makes clear that, yes this has been done for years and is nothing new as such, but this new approach gives much more accurate and higher resolution results.
- Gys 5y agoI only read the article, sorry! Its just that at the time I was often amazed by the accuracy of the service (for timing, duration and rain intensity). But I guess there is always room for improvement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- obrienk 5y agoMy dodgy shoulder can do 4 hours.
- rightbyte 5y agoLike, looking for dark clouds in the sky? Is 2h impressive?
- JCM9 5y agoThis is a bit over-hyped and not exactly a breakthrough. It’s not doing true weather prediction but rather extrapolating the movement of radar images. This is nothing new. I remember as far back as the 1990s TV weathermen would draw a line across a line of moving rain and the computer would predict which town it would get to and when. Slapping “AI” on this 25 years later is an good example of the whole present PR move of labeling things as “AI” that are just rather basic data analytics.
- donjuan7331 5y agoyep, I was researching precipitation nowcasting i.e. extrapolating radar images years ago using "AI"
- Jabbles 5y agoAI doing something that humans used to do but better is pretty much the whole point of AI. The chasm between drawing a line on a map and this system is enormous, and represents 30 years of research. It doesn't have to be a breakthrough to be in the news, it's a routine advancement of the state-of-the art.
- JCM9 5y agoNo. Drawing the line on the map was just used to decide where you wanted to show the prediction for. The forward looking prediction models themselves have been around for decades.
- ekianjo 5y agoYou did not need Black box neural networks to do statistics before.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoYou don't need a black box neural network to do statistics now. But it might be a good tool nonetheless. And it might be much less of a black box than you imagine.
- ekianjo 5y agoAs far as i know the understanding of how multi layered neural networks actually work is a hot research topic.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoIt is, but in many cases its still pretty easy to figure out. It depends on how complicated the problem is. If it's truly an incomprehensible nonlinear cesspool, then its pretty much impossible. If it's secretly a linear regression with a few forks and inflection points, its easy. The problems neural nets are used for do tend to fall into the former, but the techniques to unravel it are getting better.
- Joker_vD 5y agoI too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparently that helps to improve the accuracy of predictions when combined with other data. No idea how good their algorithm is though, I don't generally look at the weather widget on my phone anyway since looking out of the window is faster and works well enough.
- cryptoz 5y agoUsers correcting the weather in-app is a huge curiosity of mine. I first blogged about that like 8 years ago for a now-defunct project: http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/12/locally-crowdsourced-weather-notifications-to-improve-model-accuracy/ http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/12/locally-crowdsourced-weat... I have also re-implemented this feature in All Clear on Android [1]. My main lesson from all this so far is that it is useful and fun to collect and show the data, and real insights can be had by users seeing their peers' data, but incorporating the data into a model usefully is a bit more difficult! Making numerical predictions that actively use the user's weather data (rather than just showing 'x users say it is raining nearby even though the forecast says it shouldn't be') is much tougher. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
- joosters 5y agoI too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. Years ago, I set up a simple website that screen-scraped the BBC's weather predictions, and compared them against the day's weather report to calculate a very crude and basic accuracy. For the UK towns it monitors, a dumb prediction of "tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's" gives a 34% accuracy - which only falls to about 25% when predicting the weather for next week! Luckily, the proper weather forecasters do a bit better than this :) https://weather.slimyhorror.com/ https://weather.slimyhorror.com/ (Excuse the basic site, I set this up over 17 years ago, and with minimal tweaks it has been left to its own devices since then)
- 7373737373 5y agoI'd like to see a weather forecasting benchmark/comparison/competition that quantifies how much forecasting improved over the last few years
- qwertyuiop_ 5y agoDarksky models can tell you with great accuracy whether it’s going to rain in the next 10 mins and the % of precipitation.
- cryptoz 5y agoThere isn't enough info in the article to know exactly what is happening, but the problem with most of these systems (my first attempt 10 years ago, or Dark Sky, others as well) is that they use existing rainfall and wind speed to make guesses about where the rain will move. They typically fail at making real weather predictions; new rain starting to fall is a simple example that is often missed by these kinds of predictions. The article just says "maps" but doesn't say what the data is. Rainfall amount? Just rainfall or also wind maps? What other maps? Curious to see how this works in reality. Most of these attempts can be impressive sometimes, but fail often enough to make it not reliable for real use. However I am extremely optimistic about the future of increasing weather prediction accuracy, including with AI models as well as traditional physics models. We'll see I guess.
- dagw 5y agoThe article just says "maps" but doesn't say what the data is. The paper is linked in the article and answers all your data questions, including links to where you can download the data yourself.
- leemailll 5y agoSplendid. From now on for anything in my study involving correlation and causation to define future events, I will stamp AI on every sentence of the paper.
- znpy 5y agoMy grandma could predict if it will have rained in the morning for the night. So when is some investor going to come and cover my grandma with benjamins?
- donohoe 5y agoHurray! They've re-implemented the 'Dark Sky' app (since acquired by Apple) https://darksky.net/app https://darksky.net/app
- dagw 5y agoRead the linked paper. They clearly explain why this is different.
- merricksb 5y agoAnother version of the story already on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744467