Huawei Cloud's Pangu-Weather Model is the first AI model that can predict weather more accurately than state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods, and at a speed that is 10,000 times faster. In the past, predicting the path of a typhoon for a 10-day period took 4 to 5 hours of simulation on a high-performance cluster of 3,000 servers. Now, Pangu-Weather can do that in 10 seconds on a single one-GPU server. Pangu-Weather can generate a global weather forecast within seconds, with all factors taken into consideration, such as geopotential, humidity, wind speed, temperature, and sea-level pressure. Besides typhoon paths, it can also accurately predict precipitation, cold and heat waves, and more.
On July 5, 2023, Nature, the world's top scientific journal, published a paper titled "Accurate medium-range global weather forecasting with 3D neural networks", which provided a detailed report on the research results of the Pangu-Weather model.
Pangu-Weather will "make people reevaluate what (weather) forecasting models might look like in the future, ...the opening of models like Pangu-Weather will surely help with progress in the field."
-- Peer reviewer at Nature
At the 19th World Meteorological Congress, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) claimed that Pangu-Weather, a purely data-driven AI model, has been able to make such accurate weather forecasts that they can rival even their own, which were made using the conventional NWP method. Since late July, 2023, Pangu-Weather has been made available on the ECMWF website. On this website, global weather forecasters, meteorologists, weather enthusiasts, as well as the general public can now view Pangu-Weather's 10-day global weather forecasts for free.
Pangu-Weather "extends the forecast period of computer model weather forecasts from ten to fifteen days to let users prepare for potential changes in weather in advance."
-- Hong Kong Observatory
The Hong Kong Observatory has also officially launched Pangu-Weather on its Earth Weather webpage, where visitors can view 15-day forecasts on weather elements such as wind direction, wind speed, temperature, and sea-level pressure. Pangu-Weather accurately predicted that Typhoon Koinu would not reach Hong Kong before October 1, 2023, so that on that day, the people of Hong Kong successfully held their famous National Day fireworks display at Victoria Harbour.