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Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by rkagerer on Monday March 24, 2025 @01:11AM (#43457922)
Are all the inputs (from buoys, weather balloons, stations, etc) from decades of history stored, as well as past daily forecasts of existing weather models, so that this AI algorithm (and any future new ones) can be run across historic data and compared in terms of performance to existing methods?

Is there a big Clearinghouse for this data?

Kind of like how fintech algos can be run against historic stock market data to evaluate them.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by lgeorget on Monday March 24, 2025 @02:47AM (#43458233)
The World Meteorological Organization has data that national weather services exchange to make forecast. Apart from that, its on a country-by-country basis.

In France for instance Météo-France has released all of its historical data in January 2024: https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/organizations/meteo-france/#/dat...

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by graemep on Monday March 24, 2025 @04:39AM (#43458645)
But national models go beyond there borders and usually have some modelling outside so the exchanges will cover quite a lot of the world.

For example, the UK's metoffice has a low resolution medium term global model: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/approach/modelling-sys...

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by cship2 on Monday March 24, 2025 @01:18PM (#43463294)
How does windy do it? Did they just scrap all the sites or api. Would be great to have global dump every 1 minute of all the countries. Or have it have in a radio broadcast.
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by jcd000 on Monday March 24, 2025 @03:38PM (#43464663)
Windy uses openmeteo, which in turn aggregates many weather providers under one roof/api
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by _joel on Monday March 24, 2025 @03:56AM (#43458488)
> Kind of like how fintech algos can be run against historic stock market data to evaluate them.

Backtesting, that's called.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by axismundi on Monday March 24, 2025 @12:05PM (#43462589)
In weather it's called hindcast
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by trillic on Monday March 24, 2025 @12:53PM (#43463040)
afttest
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by mschuster91 on Monday March 24, 2025 @03:21AM (#43458371)
> Is there a big Clearinghouse for this data?

Many commercial and even third party governments rely on the data from NOAA and its archives, on top of that the EU runs its own EUMETSAT fleet of data, plus a ton of national services - unfortunately, the result is there's a looooot of datasets.

NOAA's dataset is public domain [1], EUMETSAT only requires attribution for most of its data [2]. On top of that you got the EU's Climate Data store [3], ECMWF [4], and ECA&D [5].

The service that many private weather services provide is to aggregate and weigh all of the publicly available datasets, and some also add in data from their own ground stations, commercially licensed "realtime" data from governmental services, and their own models as well.

The interesting question is what DOGE will do regarding NOAA - it is increasingly possible that NOAA will shut down, either to be turned into a pay-for-play model, replaced by private services, or just carelessly dropped in its entirety.

[1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/archive

[2] https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...

[3] https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/

[4] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets

[5] https://www.ecad.eu/dailydata/

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by Loughla on Monday March 24, 2025 @07:45AM (#43459811)
NOAA saves lives. Cutting that organization would be an absolute slap in the face to rural trump voters who rely on that system for weather alerts.
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by sunshinesnacks on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:12AM (#43460055)
> The service that many private weather services provide is to aggregate and weigh all of the publicly available datasets

Yes, and more people need to understand this. Too many people seem to think that commercial services won’t be impacted if NOAA stops doing what they do.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by K0balt on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:14AM (#43460077)
NOAA marine forecasts and FAA integration is critical infrastructure for marine transportation and aviation. If they shut that down it will result in direct losses much larger than NOAAs budget, and thousands of lives lost through disaster and workplace accidents.

I sure hope those “smart” people are capable of understanding that.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by mschuster91 on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:30AM (#43460279)
> I sure hope those “smart” people are capable of understanding that.

Well, NOAA can be privatized, sold off to the highest bidder and be fed money from the annual government to provide said critical infrastructure.

In the end, it's always one giant ass grift.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by NitpickLawyer on Monday March 24, 2025 @04:33AM (#43458611)
> Are all the inputs (from buoys, weather balloons, stations, etc) from decades of history stored

I was also thinking about smartphones. They have barometric data, and while it might vary from phone to phone, I'm sure something like a kalman filter + historic data could do something there.

Think about gathering all the data from "stationary" phones, correlate that with weather sat data, and with real "ground truth" weather stations, and then go back 30 - 60 min / a day, and see what comes out.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by Havoc on Monday March 24, 2025 @07:24AM (#43459662)
>smartphones. They have barometric data

For anyone else having a TIL moment: It's apparently for vertical position and supposedly sub meter accurate. o_O

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by p_l on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:13AM (#43460063)
Depends on smartphone (and smartwatches). Not all have it, at times it disappeared from brands that had it earlier.

The smartwatch series I use explicitly include it because it's essentially the "all in one" version in a series that had smartwatches designed for aircraft use (including military versions where they serve as backup cabin pressure warning, apparently)

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by usrusr on Monday March 24, 2025 @09:02AM (#43460595)
Smartwatches include barometers because they enable elevation measurement far more accurate than than GNSS (GPS and GPS-alikes, they tend to be noticeably less accurate in the vertical than in the horizontal). In particular when both are combined: barometry for high frequency changes (going up a hill) continuously calibrated against a long term average of the GNSS elevation to filter out low frequency changes in barometry (weather influence).

But back to device could weather observation, this would require continuous GNSS, devices don't do that (network location would not be good enough).

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by orion138 on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:51AM (#43460487)
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by xgulfie on Monday March 24, 2025 @10:22AM (#43461448)
I'm still grumpy about apple buying and shuttering darksky
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by thatcat on Monday March 24, 2025 @02:52PM (#43464224)
They stopped using it during later years.
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by counters on Monday March 24, 2025 @06:23PM (#43466026)
Not really; it was a gimmick. They used standard forecast post-processing techniques to bias correct global/regional weather models. There is virtually no evidence they actually used device data in this process.
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by phillipseamore on Monday March 24, 2025 @11:40AM (#43462304)
"Collecting and processing of barometric data from smartphones for potential use in numerical weather prediction data assimilation"

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/met.1805

https://github.com/dmidk/smaps

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by TheJoeMan on Monday March 24, 2025 @09:03AM (#43460601)
It would also be nice to have a historical store of the weather predictions and not just instantaneous parameters. But I'm not aware of such record, perhaps because weathermen don't want a record of their (mis)predictions...
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by ano-ther on Monday March 24, 2025 @12:02PM (#43462562)
Oh they absolutely do track their predictions and how the different models perform. That’s how they keep improving.

This is a lay-person overview which cites some of the in-depth studies: https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by interludead on Monday March 24, 2025 @09:20AM (#43460736)
Getting high-quality, harmonized data at global scale can still be a challenge, especially when it comes to observational coverage in developing regions
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by wewxjfq on Monday March 24, 2025 @09:36AM (#43460906)
There's climate reanalysis, which combines historical observations with weather models to get clean data of past weather conditions, which is then used by researchers for various purposes. Most notably is ERA5 by ECMWF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMWF_re-analysis

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by serialdev on Monday March 24, 2025 @10:12AM (#43461344)
Is there an equivalent modelling approach for earthquake prediction? A data repository for it widely shared on the same line as the top comment would work
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by roelschroeven on Monday March 24, 2025 @11:42AM (#43462323)
What data is used to train this AI? The article doesn't say anything about that (tough I have to admit I didn't read it super carefully). My first thought would be exactly all this historical data, but then you can't use that same data to test the AI's performance. Are different subsets of the available historical data used for training vs testing?
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by axismundi on Monday March 24, 2025 @12:03PM (#43462571)
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by scellus on Monday March 24, 2025 @01:12PM (#43463235)
No, they say end-to-end, meaning they use raw obsevations. Most or all other medium-range models start with ERA5.

There's a paper from Norway that tried end-to-end, but their results were not spectacular. That's the aim of many though, including ECMWF. Note that ECMWF already has their AIFS in production, so AI weather prediction is pretty mainstream nowadays.

Google has a local nowcast model that uses raw observations, in production, but that's a different genre of forecasting than the medium-range models of Aardvark.

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by counters on Monday March 24, 2025 @02:35PM (#43464072)
> Google has a local nowcast model that uses raw observations, in production, but that's a different genre of forecasting than the medium-range models of Aardvark.

It's very clear from the MetNet announcement blog[1] that they require HRRR or other NWP output at runtime.

[1]: https://research.google/blog/metnet-3-a-state-of-the-art-neu...

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by wafngar on Monday March 24, 2025 @03:03PM (#43464341)
They train with ERA5 and observations.
Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by guhidalg on Monday March 24, 2025 @01:09PM (#43463210)
There are several places you can get this data, both historical and in near-realtime.

I work on one of them: https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/catalog?filter=weath...

Re:English Scientists Develop Fast, High-Quality AI Weather ... by counters on Monday March 24, 2025 @02:45PM (#43464168)
> Is there a big Clearinghouse for this data?

The short answer is, "no." There are some projects like the "NNJA-AI" project at Brightband[1] which is attempting to create such a clearing house in order to focus research efforts across the community.

[1]: https://www.brightband.com/data/nnja-ai