The era of delivering operational weather predictions by computer began for the UK Meteorological Office in 1965 with a room-sized processor nicknamed Comet. Six decades later, the country’s national forecaster is part of another technological revolution, this time driven by artificial intelligence.
AI is supercharging predictions for the ever-shifting patterns of cloud, precipitation and temperature mapped dynamically on a giant screen at the organisation’s headquarters in the south-western city of Exeter.
“We see the potential for a real step change . . . in how we forecast, which is in some ways similar to when we started using computers,” says Kirstine Dale, the Met Office’s chief AI officer, citing rapidly growing quantities of data, computing power to handle it and models to process it. “It’s all just got bigger — and the possibilities have also become much bigger.”