Comment by baq

16 hours ago

You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days. Crucially, you can move more of the most expensive stuff out of the storm surge zone, which is where the biggest damage happens and try to flood proof more of the things which can’t be moved.

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baq

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esperent  15 hours ago

> You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days

TFA says they might be able to predict one extra day ahead (three days instead of two). No prediction system will ever give you a week's notice on a typhoon.

  • TaupeRanger  13 hours ago

    Actually it doesn't even say that - they claim to have the same "accuracy" at 3 days that older methods have at 2 days. What does that actually get you? Were the older models so much less accurate at 3 days (compared to 2) that it prevented evacuation of key areas? Looking at the paper, it doesn't really seem like this can be answered yet because there's not enough data over a long enough time.

    Keep in mind, DeepMind has a very well documented history of releasing enormously hyped up PR pieces with grandiose claims that are never backed up in real world usage, or are simply lies.

    • counters  7 hours ago

      I wish there was a way that your comment could be pinned.

      The context is so important here and radically re-frames the impact of GDM's results. Folks need to understand that with modern forecasting tools, we anticipate tropical cyclones to develop 5-10 days before they ever threaten landfall. The "2-day" vs "3-day" improvement in forecast skill is better interpreted as a modest reduction in forecast uncertainty - the "cone" on the hurricane track map gets a little narrower.

      It's not like there's a "literal extra day" of preparation time for folks who may be impacted by the storm. They get the same amount of time they always have. Nothing actually changes on-the-ground for really any consumer of hurricane forecast data anywhere in the world.

      And that's not a sleight against GDM. It's just a simple statement of how good contemporary weather forecasting is, and how good it was before AI forecast models came onto the scene some 5 years ago.