The day is coming soon when artificial intelligence (AI) will greatly increase the accuracy and speed of weather forecasting, but the human touch will still be needed to get the point across, according to one expert.
Meteorologists have long used computer-generated models of predicted weather to draw forecasts that are then disseminated to the public, and now AI is threatening to upend that model with more accurate, quickly-available data that can model weather days and even weeks into the future.
That's highly reliable raw data that a meteorologist can use to interpret how we can handle the weather, according to one forecaster.
Harris County Meteorologist Jeff Lindner told Newsradio 740 KTRH that the new information standards that will likely be set by use of AI in forecasting will be a breakthrough for scheduling future events reliably, based on whether the weather will be right; such as planning a little league baseball game during rainy summer weather could be much more accurately done using the new AI data.
But Lindner says it's the quality of the interpretation of AI's raw data that will make the difference in helping people avoid dangerous weather, cope with predicted weather events, and to know when, for instance, evacuations might be needed based on changing weather events.
"We've been looking over the past several months at this, and there's a couple of AI models that have come onto the scene and we've kind of seen how they performed during this last hurricane season, and to a degree they performed relatively well, especially with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton and even Beryl, so I think there's certainly some potential there, certainly to create forecasts with accuracy that's potentially better than some of our legacy models that we have in place now, and these models can become very quick," Lindner said.
"But the model could with 100% accuracy predict temperature, rain, wind and that kind of stuff, but it is how that is communicated then to those who receive that data.
"That's one of the pieces of the puzzle that we hear all the time, 'Oh we didn't know this was going to happen' or 'the forecast wrong.'
"But the question is, was the forecast not right? Or was it not communicated in a way where people got the information, understood the information, and then reacted to the information," Lindner adds.
Assessing raw data has long been the job of meteorologists, among other analytical professions, and even with the introduction of better and more data produced more quickly, a human touch will be required, Lindner said, if the recipient of the information is also human.