DeepMind AI predicts incoming rainfall with high accuracy

Having flexed its muscles in predicting kidney injury, toppling Go champions and solving 50-year-old science problems, artificial intelligence company DeepMind is now dipping its toes in weather forecasting. The company's latest tool is designed to predict oncoming precipitation through what's known as nowcasting, and the vast majority of meteorologists found it to be more accurate than current methods in early testing. The science of precipitation nowcasting focuses on predicting rain within the next one to two hours, and is of real importance in areas such as outdoor events, aviation and emergency planning. DeepMind set out to develop a machine-learning tool that can bring a new level of precision to these efforts, by making use of high-precision radar data that tracks precipitation every five minutes at a 1-km (0.62-mile) resolution. It did so by using a generative modeling approach, which analyzes the past 20 minutes of observed radar and then makes predictions for the upcoming 90 minutes.