AI in Weather Forecasting: Predicting When Lightning Will Strike - AI Trends

Researchers in Switzerland have figured out how to use AI to predict when and where lightning will strike. Researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne used standard meteorological data and machine learning to build a simple system that can predict lightning strike to the nearest 10 to 30 minutes inside a radius of about 18.6 miles, according to an account in Popular Mechanics. "We have used machine learning techniques to successfully hindcast nearby and distant lightning hazards by looking at single-site observations of meteorological parameters," wrote the authors in a new paper published recently in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. The researchers used data about past lightning strikes to build an algorithm that can make predictions about new lightning strikes, in a process called hindcasting, as opposed for forecasting. Estimates based on past events are fed into a model to see how well the output matches known results.