Microsoft has upgraded its foundational AI model named Aurora, which is designed to predict weather conditions with remarkable speed and accuracy. The new version can also forecast air quality, making it a versatile tool for environmental monitoring. Aurora was developed by Microsoft Research and has been trained using over a million hours of data collected from satellites, radar, and weather stations worldwide, as well as past weather simulations. This extensive training enables Aurora to deliver precise predictions for hurricanes, typhoons, and now pollution levels. Microsoft has made the source code and model weights publicly available, encouraging the developer community to fine-tune the model for specialized applications. A customized version of Aurora, capable of producing hourly weather forecasts including cloud cover, has been integrated into the MSN Weather app. Microsoft claims Aurora is among the best AI models for weather forecasting, due to its ability to learn from large diverse datasets and then adapt to specific prediction tasks such as air pollution.
