AIM for Scale Featured in The Conversation Article on How AI Is Transforming Weather Forecasting

The Conversation recently published an article by Paul Winters, Executive Director of AIM for Scale and Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and Amir Jina, Chair of AIM for Scale’s Weather Forecasts for Farmers Technical Panel and Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. The piece explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping weather forecasting — and what that means for farmers around the world.

Winters and Jina explain that while traditional, physics-based forecasting models require costly supercomputers and have been designed primarily for high-income regions, new AI-powered models such as GraphCast, Pangu-Weather, and FourCastNet can deliver accurate, localized forecasts in seconds on a laptop. This shift creates new opportunities for national meteorological services in low- and middle-income countries to provide farmers with timely, actionable forecasts at a fraction of the cost.

The authors emphasize that technology is only part of the solution. For AI weather forecasts to improve farmer resilience, they must be tailored to local conditions, validated against agricultural realities, and delivered in ways that inform real decisions — from planting schedules to fertilizer use to preparing for dry spells.

They highlight AIM for Scale’s work with governments and development partners to ensure AI forecasting tools are designed with farmers’ needs at the center. By building local capacity and connecting forecasts to decision-making, these efforts can reach millions of farmers, improving yields, incomes, and resilience.

Read the full article HERE.