The value of having data now is higher than it’s ever been,” says Greg Herman, a research scientist at the Climate Corporation in San Francisco, which uses weather information to help farmers manage risk. Weather forecasting is joining a growing number of fields, including financial management, internet advertising, oil and gas exploration, and scientific research, that are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) methods to analyze huge data quantities. (For other examples, see Physics Today, February 2019, page 17, and the article by Sankar Das Sarma, Dong-Ling Deng, and Lu-Ming Duan, March 2019, page 48.) By processing more data in a shorter time, weather forecasters could use AI methods to improve the prediction accuracy of tornadoes and other weather patterns over traditional methods. Meteorologists hope those advancements may help save lives and money.
Despite the promise of AI’s predictive capabilities, scientists face challenges in developing AI for operational forecasting....