10,000 Weatherman Jobs At Risk
There are 9,900 “Atmospheric Scientists, Including Meteorologists” jobs in the US, according to the BLS. Almost all of them are at risk in the next five years. Some are due to federal job cuts. The balance is due to the significant advantages of AI forecasting, which requires almost no human assistance.
The federal jobs are gone. The Trump Administration has cut the NOAA budget and is likely to cut it further.
Three AI weather forecast projects have been announced in the last year.
Google’s Product
Google’s product is called GraphCast. The search company describes it as “a state-of-the-art AI model able to make medium-range weather forecasts with unprecedented accuracy.” It targets forecasts over the upcoming 10-day period.
Nvidia’s product is called FourCastNet. The AI chip company describes it as “a data-driven, generative AI-based weather prediction model that matches the accuracy of the gold standard in numerical weather prediction–ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System–orders-of-magnitude faster and more energy-efficiently.” Nvidia claims it is more accurate than current practice and uses less energy.
The newest product is the Microsoft Aurora service.” It leverages the latest advances in AI to more accurately predict not just the weather, but a wide range of environmental events in a series of retrospective analyses — from hurricanes and typhoons to air quality and ocean waves. “
These are early products and the first of their kind from these companies. OpenAI or XAI has launched nothing of this sort, along with another half a dozen companies that could launch competing products.
The weatherman may not be gone soon, but person by person, it will disappear.
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