LUGANO — A revolution in forecasting natural disasters is underway, say researchers in Switzerland who are training artificial intelligence (AI) models on vast troves of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) climate data to produce potentially-lifesaving data at lightning speed.They are feeding the NASA file stash into one of the world's most powerful supercomputers so artificial intelligence can speed up and expand vital weather and climate forecasting, and spot patterns scientists could not have seen.
AI models are increasingly used in weather and climate forecasting and for early detection of natural hazards.
As well as speed, they carry the promise of spotting previously imperceptible patterns in satellite and other data, potentially making it possible to flag in advance disasters like Nepal's devastating flood, which last month left thousands dead or missing.
But training such AI models requires vast amounts of high-quality climate and Earth observation data, and significant computing power.
Researchers at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) say they now have both, after copying around 100 petabytes of publicly available NASA data onto servers adjacent to one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, known as Alps.
