The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) and the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), the national research infrastructure in data science, have signed a framework agreement to further strengthen targeted collaborations on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in meteorology and climatology.
AI-driven weather forecasting
The agreement facilitates joint projects and secures a long-term partnership. Its aim is to develop enhanced methods for capturing weather data, for weather forecasting and for gaining a better understanding of the past and future climate evolution. Over the next four years, MeteoSwiss and the SDSC will collaborate to develop and implement machine learning (ML) and AI methods.
As MeteoSwiss has been observing weather and climate over the past 160 years, it has several decades worth of high-resolution weather forecasting data on the Alpine region. According to the partners, this wealth of data has enormous potential for various AI applications. MeteoSwiss hopes for improvements along its whole value chain, ranging from improving nowcasting methods to predicting the evolution of storms within hours to enhancing the precision of weather forecasts for the next 10 days. Other potential developments include the increased automatic use of novel measurement techniques, such as weather cameras, and the quality control of measurements.
MeteoSwiss and Swiss Data Science Center further collaboration
With AI, the level of detail in climate observation of past events as well as of future climate can also be increased, the companies say. These AI-enhanced weather and climate models will be instrumental in the adaptation to climate change. They will help determine the potential of wind power and photovoltaics (PVs) or to assess flood risk. Methods and demonstration projects will be developed in close collaboration and operated by MeteoSwiss thereafter with the aim to make this data available for scientists.
For their joint work the partners engage in close cooperation with the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) of ETH Zurich and will use the computing power of the “Alps” supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, which has been specially developed to meet the needs of large-scale computing applications in the area of AI.
For more of the top insights into the future of meteorological artificial intelligence, read Meteorological Technology International’s exclusive feature “How will generative artificial intelligence transform the meteorological sector?”, here.
