News: 0177711205

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Microsoft Says Its Aurora AI Can Accurately Predict Air Quality, Typhoons (techcrunch.com)

(Friday May 23, 2025 @11:30PM (BeauHD) from the crystal-ball dept.)


An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:

> One of Microsoft's latest AI models [1]can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena , the company claims. In a paper [2]published in the journal Nature and an accompanying [3]blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.

>

> AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including [4]WeatherNext , which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.

>

> While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights [5]publicly available , says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/23/microsoft-says-its-aurora-ai-can-accurately-predict-air-quality-typhoons-and-more/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09005-y

[3] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/microsofts-aurora-ai-foundation-model-goes-beyond-weather-forecasting/

[4] https://deepmind.google/technologies/weathernext/

[5] https://microsoft.github.io/aurora/intro.html



Great! (Score:2)

by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 )

A new software Nostradamus is born, from the company that's known for the safest, most reliable and bugfree software ever.

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#3)

BRYANT DUMBELL: It's time for Round One: The Flying CompactDiscus.

JOHN SPLADDEN: That's right, Bryant. Each team member will hurl one CD-ROM
and receive points for both the distance thrown and whether the disc is
still readable afterwards.

DUMBELL: First up is Mad Hatter's Alan Cox. He struts, he winds up, and
there it goes! Look at the trajectory on that baby... Now it's time for
the Portalback's Anonymous Coward #521 to throw. This guy was voted as the
best CompactDiscus thrower in the league by popular vote on Slashdot.

SPLADDEN: Indeed, AnonCow has got some powerful muscles. No brain though.
Did you know that he dropped out of college to join the Andover.Net team?

DUMBELL: Yeah, what a tough decision to make. It's now becoming quite
common for nerd superstars to ditch college and move to Silicon Valley and
receive Big League stock options. Still, AnonCow was out for several games
this season due to a Carpal Tunnel flareup. I hope he isn't squandering
his millions... he might be forced to retire early.