Google’s AI Weather App Could be Extremely Useful to Photographers

A blizzard hits Boston.

Google has introduced a new type of AI-powered weather app capable of predicting the weather earlier than traditional models, which could be handy for photographers.

Anyone planning a photo shoot will know the anxiety of hoping that the weather will play nice and Google’s GenCast could be a useful tool because it claims to “deliver faster, more accurate forecasts up to 15 days ahead”.

According to a paper published in Nature, GenCast outperforms one of the world’s best forecast models, ENS by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

GenCast is an AI diffusion model, the same type of technology that powers AI image generators. It was trained on four decades worth of weather data, from 1979 to 2018, including temperatures, wind speed, and pressure at various altitudes. The model takes that data and learns to recognize patterns so it can make predictions about what is likely to happen in the future.

The model then made predictions for the year 2019 and beat ENS’s predictions 97.2 percent of the time. That number rose to 99.8 percent against predictions made more than 36 hours before.

It also works well on extreme weather events. For example. GenCast gave an additional 12 hours of warning for a tropical cyclone and was better at predicting wind power production.

Although GenCast was testing itself against the 2019 version of ENS, which has obviously been upgraded since then, it still “marks a significant milestone in the evolution of weather forecasting,” according to the ECMWF machine learning coordinator Matt Chantry, per The Verge.

GenCast also excels at the speed of forecasting: it can produce a 15-day forecast in just eight minutes versus ENS which can take several hours to produce the same report.

“Computationally, it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to run traditional forecasts compared to a model like Gencast,” says Ilan Price, a senior research scientist at DeepMind.

It remains to be seen whether an AI weather model will be useful in the real world but better longer-term forecasts is something that everyone, not just photographers, would be grateful for.

Google has made GenCast an open model. Its code can be downloaded here.

Image credits: Photographs by Matt Growcoot