Amazing stuff! Impressive! Faster, cheaper, and more accurate!
Will we finally get weather forecasts that are accurate for more the 24-48 hours?
How warm was the Medieval Warm Period (about 950-1250 CE)? Warmer than the current warm period (normalized for population increase and economic development)?
"Microsoft Research introduced Aurora, a versatile model trained on over one million hours of diverse geophysical data. Researchers claim Aurora can predict weather, air quality, ocean waves, and tropical cyclone tracks more accurately and efficiently than current operational systems.
The model achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains:
it beats the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) on 74 percent of air pollution forecasting targets,
surpasses ocean wave models on 86 percent of targets,
outperforms seven operational centers for tropical cyclone tracking, and
exceeds high-resolution weather models on 92 percent of targets.
Aurora’s architecture uses a 3D Swin Transformer that can handle different resolutions, variables, and pressure levels, making it adaptable to various Earth system prediction tasks through fine-tuning. The model operates at computational speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than traditional numerical models — for example, generating air pollution forecasts approximately 100,000 times faster than CAMS while running on a single GPU. For machine learning researchers, Aurora may help develop architectures that can efficiently process 3D spatiotemporal data while maintaining physical consistency across multiple scales and modalities. ..."
"... While a growing number of powerful new AI models provide new tools to help better anticipate the weather, a new paper published in Nature explains how a foundation model, known as Aurora, leverages the latest advances in AI to more accurately predict not just the weather, but a wide range of environmental events in a series of retrospective analyses — from hurricanes and typhoons to air quality and ocean waves. Developed by Microsoft Research, Aurora also forecasts this range of atmospheric events with greater precision and speed and at much lower computational cost when compared to traditional numerical forecasting and previous AI approaches. ..."
From the abstract:
"Reliable forecasting of the Earth system is essential for mitigating natural disasters and supporting human progress. Traditional numerical models, although powerful, are extremely computationally expensive. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promise in improving both predictive performance and efficiency, yet their potential remains underexplored in many Earth system domains.
Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. Aurora outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather, all at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. With the ability to be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense, Aurora represents a notable step towards democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI in environmental forecasting and pave the way for broader accessibility to high-quality climate and weather information."
Google’s Veo 3 video generation model now available in more countries
Fig. 1: Aurora is a 1.3-billion-parameter foundation model for the Earth system.
