The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) and the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) have signed a framework agreement to further strengthen targeted collaborations on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in meteorology and climatology. The agreement facilitates joint projects and secures a long-term partnership. Its aim is to develop enhanced methods for capturing weather data, for weather forecasting and for gaining a better understanding of the past and future climate evolution.
Over the next four years, MeteoSwiss and the SDSC, the national research infrastructure in data science, will collaborate to develop and implement machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) methods. MeteoSwiss has been observing weather and climate over the past 160 years, and since several decades it maintains a high-resolution weather forecasting model across the Alpine region. This wealth of data has enormous potential for various AI applications. MeteoSwiss hopes for improvements along its whole value chain, ranging from improving nowcasting methods to predicting the evolution of storms in the next few hours, to enhancing precision of weather forecasts for the next 10 days. Other potential developments include the increased automatic use of novel measurement techniques (e.g. weather cameras) and the quality control of measurements. Thanks to AI, the level of detail in climate observation of past events as well as of future climate can also be increased. These AI-enhanced weather and climate models will be instrumental for the adaptation to climate change; they will help determine the potential of wind power and photovoltaics or to assess flood risk. Methods and demonstration projects will be developed in close collaboration and operated by MeteoSwiss thereafter with the aim to make this data available for scientists.
For their joint work the partners engage in close cooperation with the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) of ETH Zurich and will utilize the computing power of the «Alps» Supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world which has been especially developed to meet the needs of large-scale computing applications in the area of AI.
This agreement brings together a diverse team of data scientists with leading researchers and practitioners in the field of meteorology and climate sciences, because only the combination and close collaboration across disciplines enables true innovation.
More information
Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss)
Contact
· MeteoSchweiz: Communication Department
media@meteoschweiz.ch | +41 58 460 97 00
· Swiss Data Science Center: Uta Ünal, Head of Communications
uta.uenal@datascience.ch | +41 44 633 41 03
