The Weather Company has partnered with NVIDIA for more than a decade to deploy technologies that enable improved predictions in the modeling of Earth’s weather and climate.
The next decade will be no different as the leading global weather provider leverages NVIDIA innovations to explore what’s possible – and do what’s never been done before – in weather forecasting and visualization across industries.
During the NVIDIA AI Summit on Oct. 9, The Weather Company’s CEO Sheri Bachstein announced that NVIDIA will help the company create a first-of-its-kind kilometer scale AI-based numerical weather model.
Bachstein explained that the AI weather models that exist today are built within 25 kilometers of the person requesting the radar. This new model, she said, will show the weather forecast within one kilometer – less than a mile – from the requester’s location.
“When you think about your own personal life, you want the weather right where you are. You don’t want the weather 25 kilometers away. It’s not really as helpful,” Bachstein said. “That’s really what it’s all about – how do we impact decisions right where we are?”
“That’s really critical, but it’s very hard to do,” she said. “And it takes a lot of manpower to get that done, but this is an amazing partnership.”
Bachstein emphasized that AI models are only as good as the data that trains them.
“So here lies the problem. We don’t have historical small-scale storm data [for the entire globe] in order to train the model, but The Weather Company’s GRAF model can do that,” she explained. “That is what we’re working on today. We are working to create this data set of historical models.”
She further explained that NVIDIA and The Weather Company’s collaboration “aims to create a historical retrospect at a high-resolution data set that then can be applied to AI technology to create this model.”
“This will help us to emulate and better understand the physics of storm scale weather,” Bachstein said. “This is when great decisions can happen. Because in order to enable a great decision, we have to have a model that’s capable of running at a kilometer scale.”
The end goal is to build a one-kilometer resolution and forecast model that updates every five minutes. Bachstein said NVIDIA and The Weather Company are striving for three things through this new project: to increase understanding; to improve value; and to create better outcomes.
“The time of imagining possibilities is over. It’s here,” the CEO said.
“The Weather Company, NVIDIA, we’re working to bring kilometer scale use cases to life every single day, so we can gain a more realistic view down to the scale of a thunderstorm,” Bachstein said. “That’s really the power of our partnership.”
The Weather Company prides itself on the fact that it leverages a mix of both human and machine talents.
“We use a very proprietary mix of AI and human expertise,” Bachstein said. “This is really our secret sauce here.”
“In using AI, we also feel that you have to be responsible,” she said. “It is an evolution of technology, probably one of the greatest technologies of our time. And it’s very powerful but it has to be used correctly, and we believe that the combination of science and human expertise is really how you do great things.”
To learn more, watch Bachstein’s entire session on-demand here.
