Microsoft's AI model Aurora can now predict air quality at high speed and precision
Microsoft's foundational AI model for weather forecasting has been upgraded and can now accurately predict air quality as well.
Aurora has been developed by Microsoft Research to forecast a range of weather-related phenomena such as hurricanes, typhoons, etc, with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological methods, the company said in a blog post earlier this week. It has also published a research paper on Aurora in science journal Nature.
Microsoft further said that Aurora's source code and model weights are now publicly available. A specialised version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds, has been integrated into the MSN Weather app.
The Windows maker has claimed that Aurora is one of the top-performing AI models in the field of weather forecasting. 'What sets Aurora apart is that it is originally trained as a foundation model and can then be specialized through finetuning to go beyond what is considered traditional weather forecasting, such as air pollution prediction,' Microsoft said.
'Because the model first learns from a large and diverse set of data, it can be fine-tuned with smaller amounts of air quality data,' it added.
Aurora has been trained on over a million hours of data captured by satellites, radar and weather stations as well as past weather simulations and forecasts, the company said. The AI model can be fine-tuned using additional data to provide forecasts about specific weather events.
Its underlying encoder architecture helps to translate massive amounts of data drawn from multiple sources into a standard format that the AI model uses to make predictions.
'We're not putting in strict rules about how we think variables should interact with each other. We're just giving a large deep-learning model the option to learn whatever is most useful. This is the power of deep learning in these kind of simulation problems,' Megan Stanley, a senior researcher with Microsoft Research, said.
Microsoft claimed that its Aurora AI model accurately predicted the landfall of Typhoon Doksuri in Philippines four days in advance and better than some expert predictions. The model also successfully predicted a sandstorm in Iraq two years ago. It beat the US National Hurricane Center by providing accurate five-day forecasts of tropical cyclone paths in 2022 and 2023, as per the company.
Aurora, which draws compute power from graphics processing units (GPUs), provides weather forecasts in seconds compared to hourly predictions by traditional weather systems running on supercomputers.
While the initial cost involved in training Aurora was high, Microsoft said its operational expenses are lower than traditional weather forecast systems.
AI weather models like Aurora are not entirely new. Over the past few years, Google DeepMind has released several AI models designed for weather forecasting such as WeatherNext.
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