Humans are still significantly better at predicting the weather than AI

Artificial intelligence is present in almost every aspect of our daily lives. It's used in search engines, email clients, media platforms, and even grocery chains worldwide. It arguably makes the world a more efficient place, but not without costs; job loss being one of them. However, there is one industry that still struggles to fully automate: weather forecasting.

 

Despite all the progress that has been made in the realm of technology, AI, and machine learning, weather companies have not yet handed over the keys to their computer counterparts. While AI models, with the help of weather satellites like GOES-16 and 17, are capable of predicting minor weather changes and patterns with surprising accuracy, their efficiency takes a steep dive when major climate disruptions occur.

These major weather shifts, including natural disasters, often have warning signs that are too subtle and small in scale for most models to detect. Even when they are detected, models can't always draw correlations between early indicators of, say, a waterspout and its likely arrival. This, Wired reports, usually requires the practiced eye of an industry veteran. The outlet claims that, based on over two decades worth of weather prediction information (gathered by the NOAA Weather Prediction Service), humans outperform two of the most popular national weather prediction models; the Global Forecast System and the North American Mesoscale Forecast System.

By how much? Between 20 and 40 percent.

That is no small gap, and it could easily mean the difference between life and death for those in the path of a vicious tornado, waterspout, or rapid-onset blizzard. Having access to accurate weather information as early as possible is what makes evacuation (where necessary) or shelter-in-place recommendations viable.

Seasoned weather veterans can look at the smallest details, like subtle shifts in atmospheric pressure, wind speed, or "available moisture," and draw higher-quality conclusions than their computerized counterparts. This is because, in many cases, weather prediction models don't weigh these measures as highly.

And frankly, that's no surprise. Computers are smart and getting smarter by the day, but they still lack something humans have always possessed: the ability to evaluate situations in a broader context. Bringing machines anywhere near parity with human memory and context awareness would require an immense amount of processing power that just isn't available widely at the moment. Only a handful of computers that might be capable of this are in development right now -- at least, in the US -- and weather groups aren't the only ones that want to use them.

In short: humans are actively being replaced across dozens of industries at an alarming rate, but for now, your local weatherman (or at least the group feeding him his data) is safe.

By Cohen Coberly January 11, 2022 (Techspot)

22,000 years of history evaporates after freezer failure melts Arctic ice cores

Around 13% of cache of ice cylinders extracted from glaciers in Canadian Arctic exposed to high heat in new storage facility at University of Alberta

Ice at Arctic

Within them sits some 80,000 years of history, offering researchers tantalising clues about climate change and the Earth’s past. At least that was the case – until the precious cache of Arctic ice cores was hit by warming temperatures.

A freezer malfunction at the University of Alberta in Edmonton has melted part of the world’s largest collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic, reducing some of the ancient ice into puddles.

“For every ice-core facility on the planet, this is their No1 nightmare,” said glaciologist Martin Sharp.

The ice cores – long cylinders extracted from glaciers – contain trapped gasses and particles that offer a glimpse into atmospheric history.

“When you lose part of an ice core,” Sharp said, “you lose part of the record of past climates, past environments – an archive of the history of our atmosphere. You just don’t have easy access to information about those past time periods.”

The university had recently acquired the dozen cores, or 1.4km (0.9 miles) of ice, drilled from five locations in the Canadian Arctic, and carefully transported them from Ottawa to Edmonton.

The samples were moved into the university’s brand-new, custom-built C$4m (US$3m) facility earlier this month. Days later, one of the freezers tripped a high-heat alarm.

“The way in which the freezer failed meant that it started to pump heat into the freezer,” said Sharp. “So it wasn’t just a question of it gradually warming up … It was actually quite rapidly raised to a temperature of 40C (104F).”

Sharp rushed to the walk-in storage freezer to survey the damage and found steaming puddles gathered around the millennia-old ice. “It was more like a changing room in a swimming pool than a freezer,” he said.

“I’ve had better days, let’s say that.”

Around 13% of the archive had been exposed to high heat, representing more than 180m of ice. None of the cores were completely destroyed.

“There are some which are clearly toast and there are others which are not obviously very much affected,” Sharp said.

An ice core from the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island lost about a third of its mass, amounting to about 22,000 years of history, while a core from Mount Logan, Canada’s tallest mountain, saw 16,000 years melted away.

But much of the collection was unaffected by the malfunction, thanks to a stroke of luck. A television crew had been documenting the ice core move and had asked that the samples be put in a second freezer because the lighting was better. The university complied, storing nearly 90% of the collection in an unaffected freezer.

“That’s basically what saved us,” said Sharp.

The question is now whether any research can be carried out on the affected cores.

“This incident will affect research, no question,” said Sharp. “It rules out certain studies that we might have wanted to conduct on the cores, such as reconstructing continuous long-term histories where parts of the cores have been lost or contaminated.”

As returning to the Arctic to replace the damaged ice cores would be a costly endeavour, the focus is now on regularly monitoring and safeguarding the ice cores that are left.

“It’s by no means a write-off from a scientific point of view,” said Sharp. “It’s just disappointing to have this happen at all and to have lost some ice that would be of potentially quite a bit of interest.”

March 2017 was second-warmest March on record

Global map of the March 2017 LOTI (land-ocean temperature index) anomaly shows that Europe and all of Russia (especially north central Siberia) were again much warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. Much of the United States was also relatively warm, but Alaska was instead cool

March 2017 was the second warmest March in 137 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

Last month was 1.12 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean March temperature from 1951-1980. The two top March temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years.

March 2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.27 degrees Celsius warmer than the March mean temperature. March 2017's temperature was 0.15 degrees Celsius cooler than March 2016, but 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than any previous March.

The GISTEMP monthly temperature anomalies superimposed on a 1980-2015 mean seasonal cycle.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet. Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.