Extreme heatwaves like the one that hit Western Europe last summer could be predicted weeks in advance using artificial intelligence.
Heat waves are rare and difficult to predict, making it historically difficult to prepare for wildfires and their impact on human and animal health.
But French scientists have unveiled an AI system that predicts them using so-called “deep learning.”
Machine learning is where AI evolves with minimal human interference, and deep learning is a machine learning offset that uses artificial neural networks to mimic the human brain.
AI, used by researchers at the Claude Bernard University of Lyon, uses environmental conditions such as soil moisture and atmospheric conditions to measure the probability of extreme heat waves up to a month in advance.
They trained the technology on 8,000 years of weather data simulated by climate models from the University of Hamburg.
AI can make predictions in seconds and can even be used to predict rare phenomena that are difficult to predict with traditional climate predictions and climate models, researchers say.
Extreme heat waves are likely to become more frequent as global warming continues.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-backed body of global climate scientists, including Maynooth University professor Peter Thorne, said last month that more than a century of burning fossil fuels has caused global warming. He said it was 1.1 degrees higher than before. As a result, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense in all parts of the world.
With each warming period, the hazards escalate rapidly, including extreme heat waves, heavy rains, and other extreme weather events.
Nearly half of the world’s population lives in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, and the number of deaths from floods, droughts and storms has increased 15-fold over the past decade.
A drought caused by extreme heat across Europe in the summer was particularly severe in wildfires and agricultural losses, with potentially €20 billion and an above-normal 20,000 deaths, according to Christian Aid’s report. Highly sexual
Wildfires across Europe prove to be costly, not only financially, but also in terms of emissions. Emissions from June to August were the highest estimated total summer wildfires in the EU and UK in the last 15 years.
France, Spain, Germany and Slovenia had the highest summer wildfire emissions in at least two decades, according to Copernicus, the EU climate change service.
Copernicus revealed in January that Europe had the hottest summer ever recorded, with all countries across the continent experiencing annual temperatures above the 30-year average.
Autumn was the third warmest on record, lasting through 2020 and 2006, while winter temperatures in 2022 were about 1°C warmer than average, ranking in the top ten.
The continent experienced its second warmest June on record, about 1.6C warmer than average.
