Thanks! That all makes sense. I think I was imagining ML-based improvements to drive accuracy in absolute terms—so it wouldn’t close the NH-tropic gap, but could raise tropic accuracy overall. But provided there are incentives for improved accuracy in the NH, I’d expect private investment to pursue it.
I agree—the data quality/quantity seems like larger bottlenecks to improving tropic accuracy. It seems possible that ML-approaches that work better with poor quality/quantity data may be sufficiently different to NH problems such that the expected private investment wouldn’t translate into improvements for the tropics, maybe opening up potential for philanthropy to have an impact… but that’s a long chain and I don’t anywhere near enough about ML/weather forecasting to make a good guess.
Thanks! That all makes sense. I think I was imagining ML-based improvements to drive accuracy in absolute terms—so it wouldn’t close the NH-tropic gap, but could raise tropic accuracy overall. But provided there are incentives for improved accuracy in the NH, I’d expect private investment to pursue it.
I agree—the data quality/quantity seems like larger bottlenecks to improving tropic accuracy. It seems possible that ML-approaches that work better with poor quality/quantity data may be sufficiently different to NH problems such that the expected private investment wouldn’t translate into improvements for the tropics, maybe opening up potential for philanthropy to have an impact… but that’s a long chain and I don’t anywhere near enough about ML/weather forecasting to make a good guess.