Why AI has trouble predicting hurricane intensity

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised weather forecasting in just a few years, with global AI weather models now able to produce forecasts that rival some of the world’s best physics-based prediction systems.

This remarkable progress has been driven by three factors: massive amounts of weather data, advances in AI models, and unprecedented computational power. While most of the current discussion on improving AI for weather focuses on the models or new hardware, the data is crucial.

At the global scale, AI has benefited from decades of climate and weather records covering the entire Earth. These datasets contain millions of examples of how atmospheric conditions evolve with time, allowing AI models to learn patterns in a way that would have been impossible a decade ago.