NOAA Develops AI-Powered Sibling to Flagship Weather Model

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced, in a statement posted on its site recently, that it has developed an “AI-powered sibling to its flagship weather model”.

“NOAA’s pioneering High Resolution Rapid Refresh short-term weather forecast model, known as the HRRR, will soon be joined by an experimental, AI-powered sibling,” the statement noted.

“This month, NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) is releasing HRRR-Cast, a data-driven model trained on three years of HRRR model data, for testing by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS),” it added.

NOAA highlighted in the statement that HRRR-Cast is NOAA’s first regional experimental AI forecast system and “a key component of NOAA’s broader Project EAGLE”. This was described in the statement as “a long-term project to provide NOAA and the U.S. weather enterprise with the ability to rapidly test, develop and identify the most promising AI models for global to regional ensemble forecasting”.

HRRR-Cast emerged from a collaborative effort within NOAAs Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research led by GSL, which created the HRRR model, NOAA said in the statement. The HRRR is a real-time, numerical weather prediction model that forecasts weather conditions across the continental United States using a three-kilometer surface grid with 50 vertical elevations, NOAA pointed out.

“As a traditional, physics-driven numerical weather model, the HRRR relies on complex mathematical equations and supercomputers to simulate atmospheric processes and predict future weather conditions,” NOAA noted in the statement.

“Data-driven models like HRRR-Cast, in contrast, ‘learn’ by analyzing vast amounts of similar, historical weather data to identify patterns which they then use to make predictions,” it added.

“HRRR-Cast is lightweight enough to run on a single laptop, unlike the operational HRRR, which requires a supercomputer,” it continued.

In the statement, project manager Isidora Jankov, GSL’s Scientific Computing Branch Chief, said, “HRRR-Cast has been shared with colleagues in NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center for evaluation and potential integration into a demonstration forecast system”.

“This represents a significant leap forward in the application of artificial intelligence to environmental modeling,” Jankov added.

“By leveraging new, high-resolution observations that help us better understand fine-scale physical processes, physical models can be improved, thereby improving the data on which AI-driven models are trained,” Jankov continued.

Jankov went on to note in the statement that her fellow researchers believe that the future of forecasting lies with a hybrid approach using both physical and data-driven models to take advantage of the gains in computational efficiency that AI techniques provide. 

In a statement posted on its website earlier this year, NOAA said forecasters within its National Weather Service predict above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year.

The organization noted in that statement that its outlook for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season predicts a 30 percent chance of a near-normal season, a 60 percent chance of an above-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, NOAA highlighted in this statement.

NOAA went on to note that the agency is forecasting a range of 13 to 19 total named storms. Of those, six to 10 are forecast to become hurricanes, including three to five major hurricanes, NOAA warned in that statement, adding that it has a 70 percent confidence in these ranges.

Atlantic weather systems have severely affected oil and gas operations in the Gulf in the past. For example, at its peak, Hurricane Ida shut in 95.65 percent of oil production in the Gulf on August 29, 2021, and 94.47 percent of gas production on August 31, 2021, U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) figures revealed.

At the time of writing, there are no weather disturbances in the Atlantic, according to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC). On Friday, the NHC was monitoring one weather disturbance in the Atlantic. This was situated in the North-Central Gulf and had a 10 percent chance of cyclone formation within seven days, as of 2am EDT on July 25, the NHC site showed.

NOAA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Its mission is “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources”, NOAA’s website highlights.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com