DeepMind's GenCast AI is really good at forecasting the weather

When Helene made landfall in Florida earlier this year, 234 people lost their lives to the worst hurricane to strike the US mainland since Katarina in 2005. It's natural disasters like that, and their growing intensity due to climate change, that have pushed scientists to develop more accurate weather forecasting systems. On Wednesday, Google's DeepMind division announced what may go down as the most significant advancement in the field in nearly eight decades of work. According to DeepMind, GenCast is not only better at providing daily and extreme weather forecasts than its previous AI weather program, but it also outperforms the best forecasting system in use right now, one that's maintained by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In tests comparing the 15-day forecasts the two systems generated for weather in 2019, GenCast was, on average, more accurate than ECMWF's ENS system 97.2 percent of the time.