Discourse Series | Harnessing AI: the future of weather forecasting

AI has the potential to revolutionise weather forecasting, predicting weather changes with greater precision and offering early warnings for extreme events like floods, wildfires and heatwaves. Can AI help us better prepare for the challenges of a changing climate?

A talk by Florian Pappenberger, Deputy Director-General and Director of Forecasts and Services at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with respondent, Dr Conor Sweeney, Deputy Director of the University College Dublin Earth Institute and President of the Irish Meteorological society.  An audience Q&A with our speakers will follow the lecture.

About the speaker:

Florian Pappenberger is Deputy Director-General and leads the Forecasts and Services Department at the European Centre For Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. He is responsible for the 24/7 production of weather forecasts, forecast quality control (verification and diagnostics), development of novel forecast products, applications of weather forecasts such as flood, drought, fire and health forecasts, numerical weather prediction relevant software development, Copernicus and Destination Earth services at ECMWF, data sales and outreach and training. He has led the migration of the operational forecasts to a new HPC centre, the establishment of the European Weather Cloud and is responsible for the Machine Learning activities at ECMWF.

Florian has a background in the forecasting of weather driven natural hazards including floods, droughts, windstorms, forest fires and impacts on human health. He has over 10 years of expertise in operational probabilistic forecasting, extreme value statistics and numerical model system development at ECMWF. Florian is the author of over 250 scientific publications and has won several scientific awards. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Meteorological Society and a member of several other professional bodies including HEPEX, British Hydrological Society, EGU, AGU, EMS, AMS. He served on the editorial board of several international journals and regularly advises on international committees including WMO, WHO and World Bank.

About the respondent:

Conor Sweeney is a Lecturer in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin (UCD). His research has a focus on renewable energy meteorology, and explores seasonal forecasting, extreme climate events, and the spatio-temporal analysis of atmospheric data. He is also interested in agricultural meteorology and is working on trying to forecast evapotranspiration. He spent a year trying to get a weather pattern analog-based code to remove systematic errors from weather forecasts. He failed but likes to think he was just ahead of the AI-curve.

Conor is also Deputy Director of the UCD Earth Institute and has a keen interest in working with people from a range of different disciplines. As President of the Irish Meteorological Society, he is also committed to raising public awareness of the importance of weather forecasting and climate change.

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Royal Irish Academy Discourse Series

The Royal Irish Academy’s discourses are the oldest and most renowned series of talks in Ireland. The first discourses were presented in 1786. Historically, Academy discourses were the occasion reserved for the most distinguished academics to first reveal and discuss their research in public. Continuing in this tradition, the Discourse Series brings international experts to the Academy to discuss important contemporary issues in front of a live audience.  Past discourses are available to watch back on ria.ie

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