British Antarctic Survey builds AI to predict ice loss

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system is about to be used to predict ice loss in the Arctic, a study reveals. The deep learning tool, called IceNet was created by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and has been trained with the past four decades of satellite data from the region. It's almost 95 per cent accurate in predicting whether sea ice will be present two months ahead – better than the leading physics-based model previously used by BAS – but it's been trained to predict as far as six months ahead. Sea ice in both the north and south poles naturally expands in the winter and shrinks in the summer. But sea ice is very hard to predict because it has'very complex interactions' with the atmosphere above and the ocean below.