The AI forecaster: Machine learning takes on weather prediction
Jan 2022, phys.org
Standard models are still good for the 2-3 week range, but this new deep learning model is on par with them for the 4-6 week range. If anyone read that scene in Neal Stephenson's Terminal Shock where they were predicting an extreme weather event 3 weeks out with a secret Chinese supercomputer -- this is what he's imagining.
via American Geophysical Union: Jonathan A. Weyn et al, Sub‐Seasonal Forecasting With a Large Ensemble of Deep‐Learning Weather Prediction Models, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2021MS002502
Study finds US flood damage risk is underestimated
Feb 2022, phys.org
Interesting example of how probability, statistics, and predictive analytics works --
The actual flood damage reports they used to "train" the models were publicly available reports from NOAA made between December 2006 and May of 2020. Compared with recent FEMA maps downloaded in 2020, 84.5% of the damage reports they evaluated were not within the agency's high-risk flood areas. The majority, at 68.3%, were located outside of the high-risk floodplain, while 16.2% were in locations unmapped by FEMA.
When they ran their computer models to determine flood damage risk, they found a high probability of flood damage for more than 1.01 million square miles across the United States, while the mapped area in FEMA's 100-year flood plain is about 221,000 square miles. Researchers said there are factors that could help explain why the differences were so large, including that their machine-learning-based model assessed damage from floods of any frequency, while FEMA only includes flooding that would occur from storms that have a 1% chance of happening in any given year [100 year storms].
-- Now remember, here in New Jersey for example, one of the fastest changing climate regions in the world, we had two 500-year storms in two years, one of them a flooding event, the other wind. I'm pretty sure the floods of September 2021 were a 100- if not 500-year storm. All in 10 years.
Totally unrelated image credit: Fractal Forums, Christmas Ornament, 2019
Post Script, on Predictive Analytics:
Algorithm can predict possible Alzheimer's with nearly 100 percent accuracy
Sep 2021, phys.org
via Kaunas University of Technology: Modupe Odusami et al, Analysis of Features of Alzheimer's Disease: Detection of Early Stage from Functional Brain Changes in Magnetic Resonance Images Using a Finetuned ResNet18 Network, Diagnostics (2021). DOI: 10.3390/diagnostics11061071
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