Top representatives from leading European meteorological institutions have come together to discuss in a podcast how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting the organisation of services and activities, highlighting the crucial role of European collaboration in driving this technological shift.

They are Virginie Schwarz, the CEO of Météo-France; Roland Potthast, the Head of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) at the German National Meteorological Service (DWD); and Florian Pappenberger, the Deputy Director-General and Director of Forecasts and Services at ECMWF.

The discussion began by identifying the fundamental aspects driving the transformation brought by AI in weather forecasting.

“Machine learning has come as a storm, demonstrating a quality of AI-based forecasts which we didn't anticipate, and really starting to either equal or outperform our traditional modelling approaches,” said ECMWF’s Florian Pappenberger.

While traditional weather forecasting relies on physical models and the immense power of supercomputers, AI enables faster forecasts with fewer computing resources, leading to changes across the entire forecasting value chain.

“With these inductive models, we learn from past data but without having this physical description of all the underlying mechanisms. This is a radical change in our way of thinking and working, both for the researchers and the forecasters. And we are probably going to keep on discovering things going against our practice and our intuition,” said Météo-France’s Virginie Schwarz.

Roland Potthast of DWD emphasised that the new methods amount to a revolution: “There is a whole science of bringing classical ideas into the AI framework, and that is just starting. We are at the beginning of a revolution and new evolution.”

Considering how the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI) is adapting to these changes, a common viewpoint emerged.

Virginie Schwarz said: “At the core, our fundamental objective remains the same: providing to public authorities, companies, and the public the best information and decision-support services, based on high scientific and human expertise. But what will change is how we do that, what we deliver.”

Florian Pappenberger agreed: “At its core, our mission also remains the same, providing the best forecasts and data to support our Member States doing the job they are mandated to do in the best possible way.”

The speakers also discussed the “democratisation of forecasts" enabled by AI advances, which could allow people to run sophisticated forecasting models directly on their laptops.

From the DWD perspective, Roland Potthast said: “Now that AI becomes a conversation partner to infer information in just one click, you want to know what is reliable. And I think this even strengthens our roles. We know how to judge information, how to process it, and how to work with it.”

Strength of collaboration

Cross-European collaborations on AI have produced impactful tools like Anemoi, a new framework for developing machine learning weather forecasts, helping to explore deployment and developments of AI models. ECMWF has been developing Anemoi in collaboration with many partners across our Member States.

Roland Potthast said: “ECMWF ran into the problem first, and they came up with a solution, benefitting all of us as we are now using it. That is an example where this collaboration really pays off.”

A view that was also endorsed by Virginie Schwarz: “Examples like the Anemoi framework, which many of us will be able to use, really help us to be more efficient and to do things faster than on our own.”

European projects have also boosted collaboration. An example is the Destination Earth initiative of the European Commission, uniting more than 100 partners across 26 countries. Its second phase includes important AI developments, aiming to help quantify uncertainty and enhance the interactive features of the Digital Twins developed by ECMWF and its partner organisations.

Virginie Schwarz said: “Météo-France coordinates the on-demand component of the Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin. And it is very interesting to see that what started as a traditional NWP collaboration project is now becoming more and more an AI collaboration project.”

The conversation concluded with an invitation to imagine how developments around AI will continue.

Florian Pappenberger said: “I think we are going to see a forecast directly coming from observations soon, and that we will need more investment into GPUs or similar technologies.”

Roland Potthast expressed his vision, saying: “With AI information processing, it will change the way we interact with data. The whole way down to the end user will change. It's more unclear how it will spread in society. The future is open.”

Virginie Schwarz added that “AI is going to turn us into real high-level experts in processing, storing and accessing data,” and she concluded with her vision for the future: “It will allow us to adopt much more flexible ways of working, and to really serve our customers better, in a more agile way, in a world where everyone expects to be updated very quickly.”

The podcast can be accessed here.

A more in-depth article can be found on ECMWF’s Destination Earth website.