Aardvark has been developed by researchers from Cambridge University supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.
Detailed in Nature, Aardvark is said to provide a blueprint for a completely new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices.
Weather forecasts are currently generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on supercomputers. The development, maintenance and deployment of these systems requires significant time and large teams of experts.
Research by Huawei, Google, and Microsoft has demonstrated that one component of this pipeline, the numerical solver - calculating how weather evolves over time - can be replaced with AI, thereby resulting in faster and more accurate predictions. This combination of AI and traditional approaches is now being deployed by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.
With Aardvark, researchers have now replaced the entire weather prediction pipeline with a single, simple machine-learning model. The new model takes in observations from satellites, weather stations and other sensors and outputs global and local forecasts. According to the team, this AI-driven approach delivers predictions in minutes on a desktop computer.
When using 10 per cent of the input data of existing systems, Aardvark outperforms the United States national GFS forecasting system on many variables and it is also competitive with United States Weather Service forecasts that use input from dozens of weather models and analysis by human forecasters.
Furthermore, Aardvark learns directly from data, so it can be quickly adapted to produce bespoke forecasts for specific industries or locations, such as predicting temperatures for African agriculture or wind speeds for a renewable energy company in Europe.
This contrasts to traditional weather prediction systems where creating a customised system takes years of work by large teams of researchers.
This capability has the potential to transform weather prediction in developing countries where access to the expertise and computational resources required to develop conventional systems is not typically available.
In a statement, Dr Scott Hosking, director of Science and Innovation for Environment and Sustainability at The Alan Turing Institute, said: “Unleashing AI’s potential will transform decision-making for everyone from policymakers and emergency planners to industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts. Aardvark’s breakthrough is not just about speed, it’s about access. By shifting weather prediction from supercomputers to desktop computers, we can democratise forecasting, making these powerful technologies available to developing nations and data-sparse regions around the world.”
Next steps for Aardvark include developing a new team within the Alan Turing Institute that will explore the potential to deploy Aardvark in the global south and integrating the technology into the Institute’s wider work to develop high-precision environmental forecasting for weather, oceans and sea ice.
Comment: Hydrogen requires a long-term mindset
I am not sure that a consensus is possible - unless it goes for liquid hydrogen (as an end product) - as (unless airships are revived) the parasitic...