Forecast accurately predicting an unusual monsoon season reached thirty-eight million farmers

From the press release:

Thirty-eight million farmers across India received forecasts this summer accurately predicting the start of the rainy season. This forecast, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), was tailored to farmers’ needs, providing them with advance prediction of the rainy season earlier than ever before—up to four weeks ahead of the rain. This represents a paradigm shift for smallholder farmers who had to make important farming decisions like what, how much, and when to plant without this information.

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The Indian Ministry partnered with an international team of researchers to select its forecast. The Human-Centered Weather Forecasts Initiative at the University of Chicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth led the effort to evaluate forecasting models, recruiting researchers from IIT Bombay, IISc Bangalore, and the University of California, Berkeley. They found that Google’s Neural GCM model and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) best predicted the monsoon. The research team then created a blended model which combined these with the India Meteorological Departments, historical rainfall observations to maximize the accuracy of the forecast. The effort was partially supported by catalytic funding from AIM for Scale, a global initiative backed by the Gates Foundation and the United Arab Emirates, which works to scale up evidenced-backed, cost-effective agricultural innovations for the benefit of farmers in low- and middle-income countries.

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This proved to be an important year for the Ministry to begin this effort. Typically, the Indian summer monsoon begins over southern India in June—the government declares the monsoon season has started—and the monsoon advances smoothly northward, bringing sustained rainfall to most of the country by July. This year, however, the monsoon was unusual. It hit the southern part of India earlier, leading most to expect an early monsoon season to come to their various communities. The monsoon progressed for about a week, and then it stopped for close to three weeks before moving again. The new AI-based forecast predicted that pause—and farmers were paying attention.

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“We have been going through an AI-driven revolution since 2022 and AI models have shown promise for many one- to two-week forecasting applications. But their ability to predict complex phenomena—like the monsoon—was unclear, and frankly, unexpected,” says Pedram Hassanzadeh, Associate Professor at UChicago, who works on climate dynamics and AI, and is a co-director of the Initiative.

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AI models are not only more accurate but also skip the need for supercomputers for forecast generation, according to Mayank Gupta, a researcher at the Human-Centered Weather Forecasts Initiative. He says, “They can be run on desktops and can be tuned to the specific weather conditions and needs of the citizens on the ground—all at a fraction of the cost and time. AI offers a huge opportunity for technological leapfrogging in forecasting, proving already to be more accurate for many types of weather forecast, and able to be easily expanded to everyone.”

There is also a Wall Street Journal article, but it says pretty much the same thing.