Researchers eye AI revolution in natural disaster forecasts

Lugano – A revolution in forecasting natural disasters is underway, say researchers in Switzerland who are training AI models on vast troves of NASA climate data to produce potentially-lifesaving data at lightning speed. They are feeding the NASA file stash into one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers so artificial intelligence can speed up and expand vital weather and climate forecasting, and spot patterns scientists could not have seen. AI models are increasingly used in weather and climate forecasting and for early detection of natural hazards. As well as speed, they carry the promise of spotting previously imperceptible patterns in satellite and other data, potentially making it possible to flag in advance disasters like Nepal’s devastating flood, which last month left thousands dead or missing.

But training such AI models requires vast amounts of high-quality climate and Earth observation data, and significant computing power. Researchers at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) say they now have both, after copying around 100 petabytes of publicly available NASA data onto servers adjacent to one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, known as Alps. “This is a huge scientific opportunity,” said Thomas Schulthess, an ETH computational physics professor and head of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in the southern city of Lugano. Standing in front of rows of what look like giant filing cabinets that contain Alps, he told AFP he was excited to have all of NASA’s climate data plugged directly into the machine. “It’s really enabling scientists to do things we would not even have thought of before,” he said. – Data is ‘everything’ – It took approximately a year to copy the roughly six billion NASA files onto servers…