Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an AI model for weather prediction this week called GenCast.
In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system.
And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more accessible explanation of the tech: While its previous weather model was “deterministic, and provided a single, best estimate of future weather,” GenCast “comprises an ensemble of 50 or more predictions, each representing a possible weather trajectory,” creating a “complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios.”
As for how it stacks up against ENS, the team said it trained GenCast on weather data up to 2018, then compared its forecasts for 2019, finding that GenCast was more accurate 97.2 percent of the time.
Google says GenCast is part of its suite of AI-based weather models, which it’s starting to incorporate into Google Search and Maps. It also plans to release real-time and historical forecasts from GenCast, which anyone can use into their own research and models.