AI can forecast the weather in seconds without needing supercomputers

An AI weather program running for a single second on a desktop can match the accuracy of traditional forecasts that take hours or days on powerful supercomputers, claim its creators. Weather forecasting has, since the 1950s, relied on physics-based models that extrapolate from observations made using satellites, balloons and weather stations. But these calculations, known as numerical weather prediction (NWP), are extremely intensive and rely on vast, expensive and energy-hungry supercomputers. Microsoft has a new quantum computer – but does it actually work? In recent years, researchers have tried to streamline this process by applying AI.