It’s yet another summer of extreme weather, with unprecedented heat waves, wildfires, and floods battering countries around the world. In response to the challenge of accurately predicting such extremes, semiconductor giant Nvidia is building an AI-powered “digital twin” for the entire planet.
This digital twin, called Earth-2, will use predictions from FourCastNet, an AI model that uses tens of terabytes of Earth system data and can predict the next two weeks of weather tens of thousands of times faster and more accurately than current forecasting methods.
Usual weather prediction systems have the capacity to generate around 50 predictions for the week ahead. FourCastNet can instead predict thousands of possibilities, accurately capturing the risk of rare but deadly disasters and thereby giving vulnerable populations valuable time to prepare and evacuate.
The hoped-for revolution in climate modeling is just the beginning. With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more exciting—and in some ways unrecognizable. The reverberations of this shift will be felt far outside the lab; they will affect us all.
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