Google‘s “nowcast” weather predictions can inform people about whether they should take a different route to work, or even if they need to evacuate their homes due to an approaching storm.
The weather can affect a person’s daily routine in both mundane and serious ways, and the precision of forecasting can strongly influence how they deal with it.
But making accurate weather predictions can be particularly challenging for localized storms or events that evolve on hourly timescales, such as thunderstorms. In “Machine Learning for Precipitation Nowcasting from Radar Images,” we are presenting new research into the development of machine learning models for precipitation forecasting that addresses this challenge by making highly localized “physics-free” predictions that apply to the immediate future.
A significant advantage of machine learning is that inference is computationally cheap given an already-trained model, allowing forecasts that are nearly instantaneous and in the native high resolution of the input data. This precipitation nowcasting, which focuses on 0-6 hour forecasts, can generate forecasts that have a 1km resolution with a total latency of just 5-10 minutes, including data collection delays, outperforming traditional models, even at these early stages of development.
Images credit Google
source Google
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