The study looked at the utilization of modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for forecasting compared to traditional approaches currently used for operational forecasts.
Maulik added, “It is a paradigm shift from looking at the classical forecasts provided by several agencies. Those forecasts are typically obtained with very large computing resources, and it can be computationally costly. We thought, what if we took an alternative route?”
According to Maulik, the AI model learns weather patterns using data from historical sources like satellite images and archival forecasts. It is built on computer vision techniques.
“Then, a trained model can make forecasts in real time, without requiring access to very large computational resources. Once the neural networks are trained and released, the model deployment can be done effectively on a laptop and, eventually, on increasingly smaller resources such as cell phones,” Maulik further added.
According to Maulik, the ICLR hosts seminars on AI-related subtopics where researchers can present their work and get feedback.
Maulik stated, “Getting accepted into a workshop, which is quite competitive, maximizes the paper’s visibility. It helps us get good feedback from both the AI and the domain sciences community and significantly improve our methods. The award itself is great; it validates our hard work. However, our long-term goal remains the same. We want to find ways to improve our current models and provide a viable competitor to classical weather forecasting approaches.”
One of the objectives, according to Maulik, is for the researchers to be able to predict weather extremes more accurately than existing models may be able to.
Maulik concluded, “Our eyes are set on grander challenges. That being said, as computational scientists, we want to solve the problem and we think of the tool after. We try to balance classical and machine learning methods and are not partial to either.”
Maulik, Tung Nguyen, Rohan Shah, Hritik Bansal, Troy Arcomano, Veerabhadra Rao Kotamarthi, Ian Foster, Sandeep Madireddy, and Aditya Grover are among the article's authors and collaborators.