Microsoft's artificial intelligence predicts global air pollution in minutes
A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by Microsoft can accurately predict global air pollution levels in less than a minute. The model, called Aurora, is also capable of generating 10-day global weather forecasts. Aurora is one of several AI weather forecasting tools being developed by tech giants, including GraphCast from Google DeepMind in London and FourCastNet from Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California. But Aurora's ability to quickly predict global air pollution is groundbreaking, researchers say. "For me, this is the first big step in atmospheric chemistry and machine learning," says machine learning researcher Matthew Chantry of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, UK. Traditional weather forecasting uses mathematical models of physical processes in the atmosphere, land and sea. To predict air pollution levels, researchers have previously used machine learning along with traditional mathematical models, Chantry ...