Google details MetNet, an AI model better than NOAA at predicting precipitation

In a blog post and accompanying paper, researchers at Google detail an AI system -- MetNet -- that can predict precipitation up to eight hours into the future. They say that it outperforms the current state-of-the-art physics model in use by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and that it makes a prediction over the entire U.S. in seconds as opposed to an hour. It builds on previous work from Google, which entailed an AI system that ingested satellite images to produce forecasts with a roughly one-kilometer resolution and a latency of only 5-10 minutes. And while it's early days, it could the runway for a forecasting tool that could help businesses, residents, and local governments better prepare for inclement weather. MetNet takes a data-driven and physics-free approach to weather modeling, meaning it learns to approximate atmospheric physics from examples and not by incorporating prior knowledge.