Nvidia announces the deployment of its Earth-2 API, a highly precise digital copy of the Earth available to governments and weather agencies. The aim is, among other things, to predict natural disasters with maximum efficiency.
Knowing the weather tomorrow or in 6 days is useful for organizing your outings. But the usefulness of weather predictions goes much further than that. They are what make it possible to know when a hurricane will hit a populated area Or if flooding is expected after a particularly heavy rainy episode, for example. In order to facilitate the work of specialized agencies and companies, Nvidia announces the creation of a virtual copy of Earth.
In detail, the Earth-2 API from Nvidia “allow virtually any user” to create “high-resolution interactive simulations ranging from global atmosphere and local cloud cover to typhoons and turbulence“, we read in the press release. Everything is based on the work of a artificial intelligence. This is not the first time that AI has been used to predict the weather. The company hopes to reduce economic losses linked to extreme weather caused by climate change, which experts estimate to be 143 billion dollars per year.
Nvidia provides a digital double of the Earth to better predict the weather
For Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, the creation of such a system is a necessity. He recalls that “climate disasters are now normal: historic droughts, catastrophic hurricanes and generational floods appear in the news with alarming frequency. Earth-2 cloud APIs work to help us better prepare for extreme weather and inspire us to take action to moderate it“.
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To generate the virtual twin of our Blue Planet, Nvidia used a new generative AI system called CorrDiff. According to the firm, it creates “12.5x higher resolution images than current digital models, 1,000x faster“, while being “3,000 times more energy efficient“. Among the first to use the Earth-2 API, we note the presence of The Weather Company, one of the world leaders in weather predictions. The company has already worked with Nvidia to improve its in-house system.