Microsoft says its Aurora AI can accurately predict air quality, typhoons, and more

One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims.

In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying 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 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 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.