Huawei Develops AI-Based Weather Observation Model... Published in Nature Journal

1 Million Times Faster Than Models Using ECMWF

Chinese company Huawei has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based weather algorithm that predicts the weather faster and more accurately than before.

According to Huawei on the 9th, the company recently developed an AI-based weather algorithm called the 'Pangu Weather' model. Huawei's development team stated in a paper published in the international academic journal Nature that this model is 10,000 times faster than the model used by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). 'Pangu' is named after the creator deity in Chinese mythology.

At the 'Huawei Developer Conference 2023' held on the 7th, a company official is explaining the AI model 'Pangu 3.0'. (Photo by Huawei)

According to the explanation, this model can generate forecasts including humidity, wind speed, temperature, sea level pressure, and even disaster warnings within seconds. It is said that AI-based models can produce more accurate results than the numerical forecasting methods used by mainstream weather forecasting services worldwide.

Pangu Weather focuses on medium-range forecasts, covering periods of up to about two weeks. Until now, AI-based forecasting has been inferior to numerical forecasting due to high costs and long processing times. Additionally, it compensates for the shortcomings of existing models, which are based on 2D models and cannot accurately process uneven 3D data. To train the model at specific time intervals, the research team reviewed hourly samples of weather data from 1979 to 2021.

Tianchi, Huawei Cloud's lead scientist (Ph.D.), explained, "If it is difficult to find a specific solution due to complex mathematical mechanisms and large amounts of data, AI is very suitable for solving this problem," adding, "Weather research is an excellent field where AI can play a role."

Huawei Cloud recently stated that Pangu Weather can complete a 24-hour global weather forecast in just 1.4 seconds on a single V100 graphics card. This speed is 10,000 times faster than existing forecasting models. Earlier, the China Meteorological Administration revealed that Pangu Weather successfully predicted the path of a typhoon that occurred east of Taiwan five days in advance in May.

Along with this, Huawei Cloud unveiled Pangu Model 3.0, a platform for AI models, at the 'Developer Conference 2023' held on the 7th. This includes a natural language processing model for marketing use, a computer vision model for image detection, a computing model applicable to medical design, and Pangu Weather.

Dr. Tian said, "Our goal is to grow other applications based on large-scale models," adding, "If we can solve one problem, we can quickly apply the solution to other similar problems." Huawei plans to collaborate with meteorological agencies worldwide to utilize the technology in fields such as agriculture, forestry, livestock, fisheries, aviation, and navigation.