Nvidia launches Earth-2 open AI weather forecast models and tools – News

Nvidia Corp. today unveiled Earth-2, its artificial intelligence models and tools for scientists, startups, developers, enterprises and governments worldwide to make weather prediction more accessible than ever.

Access to weather prediction matters because it shapes the map of human decisions, from the mundane to the profound.

If a logistics leader knows a rainstorm will hit within the next day, disrupting dockworkers, that forecast changes staffing and routing before the first drop falls. If a government official oversees critical infrastructure and sees a polar vortex on the horizon, six feet of snow in four days, then planning isn’t optional: it’s triage, staging and continuity.

The Earth-2 open technologies include pretrained models, frameworks, customization recipes and inference libraries. They allow users to accelerate all forecasting stages from observation data to generating 15-day global or local storm forecasts.

Historically, production-ready weather has been the mainstay of supercomputer-based models. Generative AI has broken free of these computation- and cost-intensive modelling simulation needs, making it accessible to startups and nations alike.

Included in the toolset is Earth-2 Medium Range, a 15-day high-accuracy predictive model powered by a new model architecture called Atlas for medium-range forecast across more than 70 weather variables, including temperature, pressure, wind and humidity. Earth-2 Nowcasting, powered by a new model called StormScope, which uses generative AI to make country-scale forecasts into kilometer-resolution, zero- to six-hour predictions of local storms and hazardous weather in just minutes.

Earth-2 Global Data Assimilation, powered by HealDA, produces initial conditions for weather prediction. These are snapshots of current atmospheric conditions at thousands of locations around the globe. Assimilation can generate initial conditions in seconds using graphics processing units instead of hours on supercomputers. When coupled with Earth-2 models, Nvidia said, this results in accurate forecasting predictions.

Earth-2 CorrDiff can downscale continental predictions into high-resolution, regional weather for fine-grain local forecasting. FourCastNet3 can deliver high-accuracy forecasting for various weather variables such as wind, temperature and humidity, surpassing leading conventional models, producing answers at 60 times faster speeds.

Weather forecasting partners

Numerous partners joined Nvidia to build using Earth-2, including Brightband, an AI weather tool provider, running Medium Range to issue global forecasts daily.

“Brightband is among the first to run Earth-2 Medium Range operationally, and the model being open-source speeds up innovation, allowing easier comparison and improvements by other members of the weather enterprise,” said Julian Green, co-founder and chief executive.

Power companies including Eni S.p.A., GCL Technology Holdings Ltd. and S&P Global Energy, are using Earth-2 tools for predictive weather analysis to operationalize.

“Nvidia Earth-2 represents a major step forward in how advanced weather intelligence can be operationalized at scale,” said Emmanuel Le Borgne, climate and weather forecast product manager at TotalEnergies SE.

Nvidia said the full-featured open-model family and tools for training capabilities for diagnostics will be licensed for commercial and noncommercial use. They will also be available on GitHub and Hugging Face upon release.

Photo: Pixabay