Amidst all of the attention that has been given to Microsoft's generative AI features, and also its various gaming divisions, another division at the company has been given special recognition by an assessment group for the second year in a row.
In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that its weather forecasting team at its Microsoft Start division has been named as the "overall most accurate weather forecast provider globally" by Forecastwatch for 2023. This is the same assessment company that awarded the Microsoft Start division the same prize a year ago for its forecasting methods in 2022.
The blog post states:
This independent study of 22 weather services for the entire year of 2023 evaluated 13 different metrics. Weather from Microsoft Start had the top scores for multiple metrics including high and low temperature predictions and cloud cover forecasts. This included forecasts for 1-5 days out. In fact, Weather from Microsoft Start’s total first place percentages were 11% higher than last year and the lead from the nearest competitor grew by 4%.
Weather from Microsoft Start has used AI to help combine weather data with "large scale computation models" along with mapping and good old-fashioned reports from real humans.
In just the past few weeks, Microsoft has revealed that the Start team has been developing all new AI models to help predict weather more accurately from as long as 30 days from now. It has also created new models using both radar and satellite data to better predict when rain and cloud cover might happen.
Microsoft added that just in March 2024 it sent 150 billion weather notifications to its users. Nine billion of those notifications were for severe weather alerts Weather from Microsoft Start is available on Windows, along with its Edge web browser, MSN, Bing, and the Microsoft Start mobile app, among other sources.
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