India boosts AI in weather forecasts as floods, droughts increase
India is testing artificial intelligence (AI) to build climate models to improve weather forecast ing as torrential rains, floods and droughts proliferate across the vast country, a top weather official said. Global warming has triggered more intense clashes of weather systems in India in recent years, increasing extreme weather events, which the independent Centre for Science and Environment estimates have killed nearly 3,000 people this year. Weather agencies around the world are focussing on AI, which can bring down cost and improve speed, and which Britain's Met Office says could "revolutionise" weather forecasting, with a recent Google-funded model found to have outperformed conventional methods. Accurate weather forecast ing is particularly crucial in India, a country of 1.4 billion people, many impoverished, and the world's second-largest producer of rice, wheat and sugar. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) pr...