By: Eric Gundersen
NASA and Development Seed are tracking Hurricane Florence using machine learning techniques, producing results six times faster than current capabilities. Their neural network-based approach calculates hurricane strength and wind speed by monitoring live imagery as it’s delivered from weather satellites. This allows NASA to create estimates hourly, a significant speedup from the usual six-hour cycle.
The primary factor for estimating a hurricane’s destructive potential is wind speed. By creating faster, more reliable estimates of storm wind speeds, authorities may be able to make better decisions about moving people out of harm’s way and moving resources where they’re needed. These decisions can help save both life and property. The issue is growing in urgency: the 2017 hurricane season was the most destructive on record, claiming thousands of lives and causing an estimated $280 billion in damage.
AI vs. humans
Estimates of cyclone intensity rely upon the Dvorak technique, which matches satellite imagery of a storm to known patterns. Once matched, it’s possible to estimate wind speed. AI experts at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center and Development Seed trained neural networks using historical hurricane imagery and classifications, allowing this workflow to be fully automated.
This allows data to flow directly from the GOES-16 weather satellite, to the NASA Cumulus framework running on AWS, to seamlessly generated predictions. Although it’s currently running at six times the frequency of traditional prediction mechanisms, the system is theoretically constrained only by the bandwidth of its satellite source.
Available now
The Hurricane Intensity Estimator, built with Mapbox, is running alongside data collected from human estimation and aerial flights. NASA plans to continue to improve the prediction models.
All news or weather services can integrate the predictions into your site via the API. All of the code and the prediction models are open source and will be available on GitHub soon.
Tracking Hurricanes with Artificial Intelligence was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.