One signal

During Hurricane Isaias, Google DeepMind’s forecast favoured a more easterly track than several established models, and the National Hurricane Center’s forecast moved towards that eastern guidance, Weather.com’s meteorologist Jonathan Belles says.

Belles says DeepMind’s model performed well on track forecasts, including some near-term forecasts that beat the NHC’s. NOAA’s specialist hurricane models also did well, however, and picked up stronger winds in a small-scale feature near landfall that DeepMind’s model was not designed to capture. The useful takeaway is not that one model won the hurricane forecast outright: performance depended on what forecasters needed to predict.

Discuss: How much weight should weather agencies give AI guidance when it gets the track right but misses a smaller-scale hazard?

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