The effect global warming has had on the planet is very apparent. Each new year brings a record of hottest days and more extreme weather such as a snowstorm in Texas which reached 2 feet of snow just last year. The weather is currently unpredictable when measured for a long time in the future, it could help save many people if they knew what would happen years in advance to prepare for severe weather conditions. NVIDIA is attempting to make a second digital world that will allow them to predict weather years in advance.
According to HPCwire, the Berlin Summit brings together participants from around the globe to harness AI and high performance computing for climate prediction. Their goal is to stimulate the climate fast enough, to emulate the physics of the climate system, and lastly the ability to visualize it. AI models, when tethered to “checkpoints” created by traditional simulation, not only enable the generation and interactive exploration of massive ensembles of possible trajectories at high fidelity, but also provide massive data compression. The longer the distance between checkpoints, the larger the compression achieved. FourCastNet today is capable of tethering between checkpoints spaced a month apart, achieving 700x data compression.
NVIDIA was able to generate 21-day weather trajectories of 1,000 ensemble members in one-tenth the time it previously took to do a single trajectory and with 1,000x less energy consumption. This kind of simulation needs some of the best available computers and according to Jensen Huang, the president of NVIDIA “These new types of supercomputers are just coming online,” Huang said. “This is as fresh a computing technology as you can imagine”. According to Nvidia.com, “Earth-2 aims to improve our predictions of extreme weather, projections of climate change, and accelerate the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies”. In other words, it will allow us to know of extreme weather, and the effects of climate change, much faster. This allows us more time to move or prepare for those situations.
