Weather Lab, Google's interactive website to help predict hurricanes

Environment Editorial, June 13 (EFE).- DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary, launched Weather Lab, an interactive website to share its climate models and help predict hurricane formation.

The US giant's subsidiary, along with Google Research, has partnered with the US National Hurricane Center to implement this tool, which will support its predictions and alerts during the extreme weather season.

Hurricanes are considered extremely dangerous and have caused economic losses of up to US$1.4 trillion over the past half-century.

DeepMind indicates that due to the nature of these events—also called typhoons or cyclones, depending on the geographic area—which are highly sensitive to even small differences in atmospheric conditions, they are particularly difficult to predict accurately.

Therefore, improving the reliability of these predictions can help protect communities and contribute to their better preparation to effectively deal with these natural disasters and, consequently, proceed with early evacuations.

The Google subsidiary also notes that Weather Lab includes its latest experimental AI hurricane model, based on stochastic neural networks.

This new model, he says, is capable of predicting cyclone formation, including its location, intensity, size, and shape, generating 50 possible scenarios up to 15 days before they occur.

Internal testing reveals that this model's predictions of cyclone location and intensity are as accurate—and often even more so—than current physics-based methods.

Just this week, a report from Colorado State University (CSU) warned that the probability of a major hurricane, Category 3 or higher, hitting the United States during the current Atlantic hurricane season is 51%, above the historical average of 43%.

During the current Atlantic hurricane season, from June 1 to November 30, there is a 26% chance of a major hurricane making landfall on the East Coast of the United States, a 33% chance of a major hurricane making landfall on the South Coast from Northwest Florida to Brownsville, Texas, and a 56% chance of a major hurricane making landfall in a Caribbean country, according to EFE.

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File photo of a woman standing in front of a flooded road near Lake Pontchartrain, in the United States, as a hurricane approaches. EFE/ DAN ANDERSON