Alfred forecast

[Black Orchid]

Looks awesome!

[tllwd]

A week before Tropical Cyclone Alfred was nearing the east coast of Australia, most forecasts were favouring a path either well offshore or near the central Queensland coast.

There was a curious anomaly though: an AI prediction from Google's DeepMind, called Graphcast, was predicting the centre of Alfred would be just 200 kilometres off the coast of Brisbane.

That forecast, made 12 days before ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred crossed the south-east Queensland coast, was far more accurate than leading weather models used by meteorological organisations around the world, including our own Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).

AI was also outperforming standard models on Alfred's final approach when the system started stalling.

So how can an AI forecast be more accurate than our current weather models, which run on some of the fastest supercomputers on the planet?