How Machine Learning Could Help to Improve Climate Forecasts

As Earth-observing satellites become more plentiful and climate models more powerful, researchers who study global warming are facing a deluge of data. Some are now turning to the latest trend in artificial intelligence (AI) to help trawl through all the information, in the hope of discovering new climate patterns and improving forecasts. "Climate is now a data problem," says Claire Monteleoni, a computer scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC who has helped to pioneer the marriage of machine-learning techniques with climate science. In machine learning, AI systems improve in performance as the amount of data that they analyse grows. This approach is a natural fit for climate science: a single run of a high-resolution climate model can produce a petabyte of data, and the archive of climate data maintained by the UK Met Office, the national weather service, now holds about 45 petabytes of information--and adds 0.085 petabytes a day.