Highlights from 2025 National Tropical Weather Conference
As part of KIII TV series of Alan Holt’s interviews at the 2025 National Tropical Weather Conference CBI’s, Dr. Tissot discussed his talk on AI and Weather with Alan on April 4th:
Dr. Tissot spent the start of April at the 2025 National Tropical Weather Conference in South Padre Island, Texas, where he was one of the invited speakers. He joined hurricane and tropical weather experts from the National Hurricane Center, members of the broadcast community, scientists studying hurricane, storm surge, the impact of climate change and a group of well-organized and technologically savvy storm chasers providing invaluable insights and footage of what happens on the ground and in the air during these large storms. Dr. Tissot shared CBI recent results as part of the NSF AI institute AI2ES.org and how CBI has worked for 25 years on designing and deploying AI models predicting coastal processes from water levels and storm surges to fog, lightning, and sea turtle cold stunnings. The talk also went over a brief history AI, how AI works for environmental predictions, and an overview of the new generative AI models that may be changing how we are predicting weather. This included the recent performance of Google’s GraphCast predicting the track of 2025 Tropical Cyclone Alfred. Listen to the interview of AI2ES Director Amy McGovern. The history of AI was a little more sophisticated than in the photo below but who can resist asking ChatGPT for illustrations (as long as one checks the content!). The talk ended by recommending that scientists and professionals from various background work together from the ground up to develop AI environmental models, goal that the NSF AI2ES AI Institute recently emphasized in a 2024 Nature Natural Hazards paper: Finally, a big thank you to Brownsville Warning Coordination Meteorologist Barry Goldsmith for taking the pictures and for the great conversations including with Brownsville NWS meteorologists Rodney Chai and Amber McGinnis.
Introductory slide to the AI history part of the talk. Who can resist using Large Language Models (LLMs) to illustrate a talk?
A slide on the progression of the number of talks at American Meteorological Society (AMS) AI conference organized by the AMS AI committee that Dr. Tissot led for several years. The graph shows how AI has grown rapidly since 2017 in our field. And stay put for an updated graph showing the progression of the AI Methods that one of Dr. Tissot’s students is working on.
Dr. Tissot shared a recent development in the use of AI for the prediction of tropical cyclone, the excellent performance of Google’s GraphCast model predicting the track of Feb 20-March 4 Tropical Cyclone Alfted.
