A record El Niño puts AI weather forecasting to the test (opens the source in a new tab)
- This year's El Niño is already the strongest on record and is expected to peak in December. The World Food Programme projects 274mn more people facing acute food insecurity by the end of 2027.
- AI makes forecasting faster and cheaper. UN agencies and the Red Cross use it to plan, a non-profit texts AI-based advice to farmers in Kenya, and hedge funds used it to bet early on sugar.
- Sceptics say the models learn from a cooler past. In a Met Office study, AI missed an extreme European winter that a physics-based model caught.
- 274mn
- more people facing food insecurity by 2027
- 3.7°C
- forecast December sea-heat anomaly
Why it matters Weather is now a market and policy variable: food prices, shipping and harvests hang on it. AI makes forecasts cheap enough to reach a smallholder's phone, which may matter more than any gain in accuracy.
Watch next How AI forecasts score this winter. Models trained on the past can miss the extremes a warmer world produces, and a confident wrong forecast can do more harm than none.