Silicon Valley lab works on predicting future atmospheric river storms
SANTA CLARA – These last few weeks, the Bay Area has been hit hard with a series of strong atmospheric rivers, causing severe flooding, mudslides, toppled trees, and power outages.
A Silicon Valley tech company is now getting into the science of weather. Nvidia is using its technology to better predict powerful atmospheric rivers.
"If you walk with me, let's take you into our big dark demo room," said Sameer Dhillon, Nvidia Technical Marketing Manager Demo Lab.
Dhillon is Nvidia's demo room expert. He's been their technical marketing manager for their demo lab for the last seven years. The first thing he showed us was exactly what Nvidia is known for.
"You're looking at the world's most complicated chip," said Dhillon. "Think of it as the biggest, fanciest math calculator they have in the world, and even one chip doesn't cut it for the scientist today. They're doing calculations on eight of these chips together to essentially do thousands and thousands of calculations every second. We power the world's top 50 super computers with our technology."
Nvidia is now using this technology along with its artificial intelligence to help us with something we've all been dealing with lately in the Bay Area: strong atmospheric rivers.
KPIX spoke to Anima Anandkumar, Nvidia's Senior Director of AI Research and Bren Professor at Caltech.
"Our data-driven AI model has millions of parameters, learning all the parameters solely based on historical data, so it has a lot more potential to learn from the past as opposed to numerical models that are running today," said Anandkumar.
With their AI technology, they created a digital twin of our planet, a simulation of the Earth.
Nvidia said its "FourCastNet" weather model can forecast extreme weather events, predicting the precise path of catastrophic atmospheric rivers 45,000 times faster than current weather models, running thousands of simulations and possible outcomes in less than a second.
For Anandkumar, this work is her passion.
"Weather and climate, dealing with climate change mitigating that, is one of the biggest challenges we see today, and so every day, when I get up and I remember what I'm doing now continues to drive me and inspire me," said Anandkumar.
"You can actually see a real-world impact, working on these problems on a day-to-day basis," said Dhillon.
For Dhillon, it's both motivating and rewarding to know this technology can help us better prepare and protect us when extreme weather hits.
Nvidia said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has expressed interest in its FourCastNet weather model and is in the process of evaluating it.