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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL be a “big disruptor” in the world of weather forecasting, allowing more models to be run to reduce uncertainty in predictions, according to Met Éireann’s head of forecasting.
Advances in AI have developed rapidly in recent years – bringing with it both positives, such as increasing the speed of certain tasks, but also negatives, like the massive burden it puts on energy demand and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions.
In meteorology, AI-based weather models are being developed that could potentially outperform existing, traditional systems for predicting the weather.
Speaking to The Journal, Met Éireann’s Head of Forecasting Eoin Sherlock outlined that Met Éireann is laying the groundwork to integrate AI developments into its work, explaining that AI can help to produce forecasts that have “more confidence” and “less uncertainty”.
Google DeepMind, an AI research lab based in London, has developed an AI-based weather model called GenCast.
In December, it announced that its model showed better forecasting skill than the ECMWF, claiming that GenCast’s forecasts were more precise than the ECMWF’s in 97% of tests based on 1,320 real-world scenarios. GenCast only needs eight minutes to produce a 15-day forecast, a process that ordinarily can take hours.
“Instead of running traditional models on supercomputers, you can have more forecasts – what we call an ensemble of forecasts,” Sherlock said.
“The more times you run a model, the more confidence you can have in the output. Let’s say you run it 100 times and 90 of the models are saying there’s going to be a Red-warning level wind event in Cork – then you’ve more confidence, there’s less uncertainty. That’s something that machine learning and AI will do.”
Professor Andrew Parnell of University College Dublin, who is leading a new research programme at Met Éireann aimed at developing weather and climate services for Ireland using AI and data science, has said that AI can “play a vital role in understanding the impacts of our emissions and providing predictions of future extreme weather events”.
It poses problems too, though. Training and using artificial intelligence takes massive amounts of energy, often powered by fossil fuels that release harmful greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
The escalation of climate change means that Ireland is likely to experience more extreme weather events, such as storms, more frequently and with more intensity.
The first four months of the 2024/2025 storm season, which began in September, brought four storms to Ireland: Aisling, Bert, Connall and Darragh.
Storm Darragh felled trees, brought strong gusts of wind, and knocked off power to thousands of properties just weeks before Christmas.
“Storm Darragh was dragged along by a jet stream at 200 knots per hour and that’s why it was so energetic and such strong winds,” Eoin Sherlock explained, speaking to The Journal as part of a wide-ranging interview.
As he looked back on some of the main weather events of the year, Sherlock said: “Darragh was really impactful. The winds came from the northwest direction and that’s unusual, because usually the predominant flow for us is southwesterly, so you had trees that had survived a long period of time and then all of a sudden, a wind that they’ve never seen before comes down.”
Met Éireann is setting up a research proposal on future storms to look at how certain levels of climate change would impact different types of storms.
“Global average temperatures have increased by 1.1 degree since 1900. For every degree of temperature rise, there’s 7% more moisture in the atmosphere, and that moisture in the atmosphere falls down as rain,” Sherlock said.
“We know from our colleagues in climate modelling that we can expect some more severe storms and we’re seeing that,” he said. “Those storms, over a big fetch across the Atlantic, can bring high waves, and as sea levels increase, there’s also more chance of coastal inundation.”
Met Éireann has started to transition to focusing its weather warnings on not just the type of weather on the way but also, importantly, the impacts that it threatens.
“We’ll say what impacts there could be, like flooding, coastal inundation, or trees down due to wind,” Sherlock explained.
“The plan is to move from what the weather will be to what the weather will do. We tried to do that for Storm Bert where we were warning about west Cork and west Galway – there were landslides in Galway and very heavy rain in Cork. We’re trying to give people a steer about where we think the significant impacts will be.”
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UCC fell 50 places to 283. DCU was at 380.
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2016
Next time, try reading the report rather than copying the mistake RTE made.
burn!
Caught rotten!
Somebody got out the wrong side of the bed at the dorm this morning.
ouch.
NUI Galway is a wonderful university with a beautiful campus and great teaching facilities and staff. Surprised they’re not higher in the rankings. But like it says in the article, the evaluation method is highly deficient.
i did my degree in NUI Galway and did think it is a wonderful university to be a student, but having done post-docs in Oxford. It is just a another level. (In fairness to Galway it has no where near the budget or choice of students of Oxford). Also been to Queens in Belfast, which is higher in the rankings than Galway, and think there probably isn’t a great deal of difference between the two.
Irish universities are fine, until you to go truly world class ones.
For undergrad they’re hugely underfunded, staff are under-qualified and overstretched and for oist-grad and research they’re far far worse.
Phil
A lot of that is down to money, Politics is a big issue via intra university politics combined with general politics, young people who are not suited to college are herded in there in large numbers, third level in every form is now big business and this effects how successful and good a university can be.
I know what the reasons are. It’s just the “Irish universities are fantastic” nonsense annoys me. They’re not, they’re shít, they’re degree mills and little else now. Which is a shame. We should have at least one world class Universitiy.
I really don’t get where the notion of “Irish universities are fantastic”. I’ve never heard of an Irish university being anywhere near the class of the likes of Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, Harvard. Irish Universities try to make themselves far more prestigious then they are by utilizing holes in a broken system to artificially inflate points, but the points needed almost never translates to the quality of a course that you will receive.
To put Oxbridge into comparison. Oxbridge takes in about 6000 people a year, out of 424,000 who in the UK got a university place 1.4% are good enough to get into Oxbridge. Ireland has 23,243 first year students. So for a university in Ireland to be as selective as Oxbridge it would have ~325 first years in total.
I dunno… I did my PhD in the UK and am still in the same place and it would be considered strong upper table in terms of rankings and all I can say is… the hand holding the students get here in the UK, in my experience is shocking. Truly shocking. If you call Irish universities degree mills then I think here is like, degree churning on an industrial scale . And the academics agree. I can’t speak for physics, it’s not my field but molecular biology students are spoon fed to an extreme. I found the standard at Trinity far better than here and the rankings are QUITE different, but that’s just me. Then I know a senior guy, Cambridge undergrad, Oxford PhD who audits TCD with an old colleague and he thinks TCD is great. Or he’s just being polite to me. Thought he’s not so much a people person…
I’m not saying any Irish Uni is as selective as Oxbridge, I implied that they instead use shady practices to be that bit more selective. Titus, currently I am enjoying my degree in the UK, I switched same degrees from an Irish Uni to a UK uni, and for a political degree, I feel I get a far more rounded view of global politics in the UK uni. Support offered is far greater as well.
Fair enough, Aaron. I’m sure it’s subjective. I just find here with my area (molecular biology), that students are overly accommodated. I always say that I think the tail wags the dog here. Like it’s my JOB to make sure they pass etc. when it’s my job to lecture to them to a good standard. I have no problem answering questions etc. but I have a real issue being inundated with excuses for why someone failed other than, they weren’t good enough. I just didn’t see it in TCD. If you fail you are gone. Very few excuses tolerated.
Obviously though, it goes without saying the standards here are still excellent. Just find it very student-centric but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. UK students seem to be more forthcoming about what they expect from an education which is commendable.
It is completely subjective of course. I don’t experience that level of hand holding in my degree, however, I am positive it exists. However, after I dropped out of the Irish Uni I did get an email from my tutor, saying that he can mark my failed assignment as a pass and I can turn in my final project of the year months later (intentionally didn’t hand it in as I knew I would be dropping out and taking a gap year). Which is something that really annoyed me. It is completely subjective to each person and each degree’s case.
I wouldn’t go as far as Phil and say they are just shít. I mean TCD is ranked quite highly in the rankings. I don’ think any Irish University can be comparable to Oxbridge, Harvard or MiT in class. Obviously not. I don’t think Irish Universities are World Class and neither do the rankings, a lot of my friends study in UCC and they love it and that’s what matters, same with my girlfriend she attained a nursing degree from UCD just recently and she found it to be quite good. I just don’t really like when people do inadvertently compare our Unis to the likes of Oxbridge by claiming our Unis are World Class.
These rankings are heavily weighted to research funding/publication. In many, undergraduate students are unlikely to have much contact with the academics who score the ranking points. While researchers are doing their thing, teaching undergrads is often delegated to post-grad students.
” I don’ think any Irish University can be comparable to Oxbridge, Harvard or MiT in class. Obviously not.”
They’re not comparable, agreed. But they could be if they were funded properly.
Disagree Phil, we don’t have the population to sustain a world class University without the student body being about 80% non Irish. the funding requirements with be huge. St John’s College (richest of 39) in Oxford has an endowment of 400 million alone. With 400 undergrads. We would require say NUI Galway to have about 1 billion euro of assets. The Oxford university itself (not collages ) spends around 1.2 billion pounds a year itself. https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/organisation/finance-and-funding?wssl=1
Endowments are meaningless of properly funded.
UCL 7th in the world has an endowment of 103 million GBP.
TCD 98th has an endowment of 144 million EUR.
A bit ironic given that one of the main reasons Irish university education has deteriorated so much in the past decade is because they changed how they did stuff in order to chase better rankings (e.g. modularisation, more emphasis on post grad and consequent publication etc.).
It should also be remembered that there are serious similarities between the university crisis and the health crisis here. While universities were eliminating tutors for undergraduates and many untenured lecturers, tenured staff (especially senior ones) were pocketing far more dosh than they would earn in the real world, or in comparable countries.
They changed how they did stuff because they were encouraged to do more with fewer resources because of the patently ridiculous way in which universities are funded in order to perpetuate the “free university education for all” nonsense.
I 100% agree.
Agree completely that they had to cope with less money, but disagree vigorously with where they chose to enforce cuts.
Pulling up the ladder behind you has become a senior management sport here since the crash.
One of the problems with the narrative of the 12.5% tax rate being the basic foundation of the states economic success is that is excludes all other aspects of the country as being important. If we continue this narrative in it’s present incarnation it is possible that we could damage other aspect of the country, thinking they are unimportant, when in fact, they are just as or even more important than the 12.5% tax rate. The quality of our education system is just one example. If the reputation of our third level education system continues to drop, 12.5% tax might not be enough anymore.
You can replace “we” with “neoliberal s(um/Fine Gael”.
What’s wrong with being liberal or neo(new). would you rather be old illleberal!
Patrick it’s a misnomer, go read the wiki page on neoliberalism to introduce yourself to the ideology.
you will never find a more wretched hive of $cum and villainy than neoliberalism (and mos eisley)
I’d recommend you read the book Dirty Wars, neo-cons are far more wretched than neo-libs, look at Rumsfield and Cheney during the immediate days after 9/11 and during the Iraq War.
There are 10,000 universities in OECD countries and Ireland has 4 in the top 300 (TCD, UCD, NUIG and UCC). This is a remarkable achievement.
These past 5 year have been very difficult in the sector – staff morale is very low (fewer permanent jobs, pay is back where it was in 2000), funding for teaching has dropped by 50% since 2009 and student numbers continue to climb. On top of this performance management puts increased emphasis on research. The young lecturer lives in a very hostile world indeed.
“There are 10,000 universities in OECD countries and Ireland has 4 in the top 300 (TCD, UCD, NUIG and UCC). This is a remarkable achievement.”
Like f__k it is. We have seven universities and thirteen ITs for a population of around 5m.
Sweden has fourteen universities and sixteen ITs (equivalent) for a population about twice ours and has three in the top 100.
IN terms of GDP per capita among the OECD countries we’re above Finland (University of Helsinki – 91st), Belgium (KU Leuven – 79th), Germany (60th, 38th, 72nd, 98th), UK (4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 19th, 21st, 29th, 37th, 41st, 51st, 63rd, 74th, 75th, 77th, 82nd, 84th, 87th, 93rd) and on par with Netherlands (57th, 62nd).
They are falling down the International ladder and their answer is give us MORE MONEY.
Of course it is. How the f__k else do you think you improve a university?
Can you add the word “again” to the end of the headline because we have continuously fallen since the bust.
Must be the Pav that shades it!
One thing noted from the University Rankings list is that Switzerland and Australia are very high performers. Most of their unis in the top 50. Im shocked at University of Limericks standing. This University was once way better in terms of International funding compared to NUI. France,italy and even Germany arent doing as well.
Lots of European countries go for a model where research is done in research institutions rather than universities so effects university rankings.
and to this day, UCC students still try and tell me about UCC being the only 5 star rated college in Ireland, sourcing from a report in 2011..
What about the University of Limerick and Maynooth University? If information is to be given about Irish Universities, then maybe include all Irish Universities in the article.
UL: ranked 550-600
Maynooth:ranked 650-700
Maybe, but in the Global Snowflake Rankings they are world class!
But seriously, this is just a side affect of the poison that is infecting our educational institutions – they’re more concerned with trigger warnings, safe spaces , gender neutral bathrooms than been world class at learning/research.
We have a generation of perpetually offended young people, the rot emanates from the students unions and orgs – until that is addressed we will continue to witness this slide.
Another fine mess labour party left us in.
the issue should be less about a few universities falling down the ladder and more about the average ranking for all of Ireland’s Universities and IoT. I suspect that would reflect the true stat of affairs and be much worse
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