ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL be a “big disruptor” in the world of weather forecasting, allowing more models to be run to reduce uncertainty in predictions, according to Met Éireann’s head of forecasting.
Advances in AI have developed rapidly in recent years – bringing with it both positives, such as increasing the speed of certain tasks, but also negatives, like the massive burden it puts on energy demand and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions.
In meteorology, AI-based weather models are being developed that could potentially outperform existing, traditional systems for predicting the weather.
Speaking to The Journal, Met Éireann’s Head of Forecasting Eoin Sherlock outlined that Met Éireann is laying the groundwork to integrate AI developments into its work, explaining that AI can help to produce forecasts that have “more confidence” and “less uncertainty”.
Google DeepMind, an AI research lab based in London, has developed an AI-based weather model called GenCast.
In December, it announced that its model showed better forecasting skill than the ECMWF, claiming that GenCast’s forecasts were more precise than the ECMWF’s in 97% of tests based on 1,320 real-world scenarios. GenCast only needs eight minutes to produce a 15-day forecast, a process that ordinarily can take hours.
“Instead of running traditional models on supercomputers, you can have more forecasts – what we call an ensemble of forecasts,” Sherlock said.
“The more times you run a model, the more confidence you can have in the output. Let’s say you run it 100 times and 90 of the models are saying there’s going to be a Red-warning level wind event in Cork – then you’ve more confidence, there’s less uncertainty. That’s something that machine learning and AI will do.”
Professor Andrew Parnell of University College Dublin, who is leading a new research programme at Met Éireann aimed at developing weather and climate services for Ireland using AI and data science, has said that AI can “play a vital role in understanding the impacts of our emissions and providing predictions of future extreme weather events”.
It poses problems too, though. Training and using artificial intelligence takes massive amounts of energy, often powered by fossil fuels that release harmful greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
The escalation of climate change means that Ireland is likely to experience more extreme weather events, such as storms, more frequently and with more intensity.
The first four months of the 2024/2025 storm season, which began in September, brought four storms to Ireland: Aisling, Bert, Connall and Darragh.
Storm Darragh felled trees, brought strong gusts of wind, and knocked off power to thousands of properties just weeks before Christmas.
“Storm Darragh was dragged along by a jet stream at 200 knots per hour and that’s why it was so energetic and such strong winds,” Eoin Sherlock explained, speaking to The Journal as part of a wide-ranging interview.
As he looked back on some of the main weather events of the year, Sherlock said: “Darragh was really impactful. The winds came from the northwest direction and that’s unusual, because usually the predominant flow for us is southwesterly, so you had trees that had survived a long period of time and then all of a sudden, a wind that they’ve never seen before comes down.”
Met Éireann is setting up a research proposal on future storms to look at how certain levels of climate change would impact different types of storms.
“Global average temperatures have increased by 1.1 degree since 1900. For every degree of temperature rise, there’s 7% more moisture in the atmosphere, and that moisture in the atmosphere falls down as rain,” Sherlock said.
“We know from our colleagues in climate modelling that we can expect some more severe storms and we’re seeing that,” he said. “Those storms, over a big fetch across the Atlantic, can bring high waves, and as sea levels increase, there’s also more chance of coastal inundation.”
Met Éireann has started to transition to focusing its weather warnings on not just the type of weather on the way but also, importantly, the impacts that it threatens.
“We’ll say what impacts there could be, like flooding, coastal inundation, or trees down due to wind,” Sherlock explained.
“The plan is to move from what the weather will be to what the weather will do. We tried to do that for Storm Bert where we were warning about west Cork and west Galway – there were landslides in Galway and very heavy rain in Cork. We’re trying to give people a steer about where we think the significant impacts will be.”
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