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Environment and Climate Change Canada will use artificial intelligence to make its weather forecasts more accurate, the federal department said Thursday.
It plans to launch a hybrid model this spring that uses both AI and traditional forecasting and says the combination of the two will lead to more accurate predictions.
“The new hybrid model relies on AI to better predict future weather conditions, as well as relying on the traditional physics-based model to bring in our knowledge of unique local factors like wind, temperature and precipitation,” it said in a news release.
AI can analyze decades of historical data covering a whole continent in minutes, the department said, adding AI models “identify relationships between temperature, wind and pressure and use those learned patterns to estimate the future atmosphere, especially for major weather events like heat waves, or for tracking hurricanes.”
The hybrid model is better at predicting extreme weather, such as strong winds or heat waves, because the traditional model “keeps the small-scale details that AI models tend to miss,” the release said.
Experts weigh in with safety tips to stay safe and protect your property, food, devices and vehicles during adverse weather events in Quebec.
With the new model, Environment Canada said its six-day forecast will be as accurate as its five-day forecast. It said that’s “particularly significant because previous improvements to forecasting were only possible after several years of research and development.”
It said the hybrid system will also be faster at predicting major systems such as winter storms, heat waves and atmospheric rivers.
Environment Canada said that over the past year, its “scientists and meteorologists have been carrying out extensive testing on the hybrid model, running it in parallel with our traditional model to evaluate its performance for predicting weather conditions in Canada.”
The department added it will continue to rely on its meteorologists, whose is judgment is “critical” to interpreting results and communicating them to the public.
“The fact that that much climate data can be analyzed so quickly and incorporated into a product that we can use is exciting,” said Halifax-based Cindy Day, who has been a meteorologist for more than 40 years.
Day added that being able to identify systems earlier will benefit public safety by giving people more warning of big storms.
But she questioned how helpful historical data can be, given the effects of climate change.
“The rate at which our temperatures are changing and our climate is changing is significant. And so I’m not sure that the analysis of so much data going back so much time so very quickly is going to make a big difference into producing a forecast for the next five, six, seven days,” Day said.
