How Planette helps NASA use quantum principles for weather forecasting

Extreme weather is becoming a more frequent part of day-to-day life, and long-range forecasting can help governments and businesses alike prepare for severe weather.

Planette’s subscribers are usually businesses with physical assets that might be environmentally vulnerable. But now, the company is working with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences to forecast extreme weather using AI and quantum computing algorithms.

In an interview with Tech Brew, Planette CEO Hansi Singh said the company trains AI on existing models of Earth, like those used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that contain the physics of how the ocean and atmosphere interact with each other. Then, its AI is able to forecast extreme weather up to six months in advance.

“If you invest in the training [the AI], then the actual inference where you produce the forecast, either daily or weekly, is super, super, super cheap,” Singh said. “That is the advantage of the AI, because you can learn the physics, but you can run it extremely efficiently.”

Through the company’s partnership with NASA, Singh said they’re working on QubitCast, which will forecast “one-off events”—like extreme weather—using “quantum algorithms that are even more efficient” than AI algorithms.

“That analysis would really help increase the time horizon over which you can see that an extreme event has a certain probability of occurring,” Singh said. “My goal is to make it so that every agency, every business that has some environmental vulnerability is looking at forecasts like this, knows what’s ahead, and is preparing adequately.”

QubitCast is still in the research and development stage, as is another AI forecasting model the company is working on with the National Science Foundation. Singh said she’s excited about the progress on both projects, especially because they’re focused on adapting to the effects of the climate crisis.

“Depending on how fast we get our act together—or don’t get our act together in terms of the energy transition—that adaptation is going to be huge and expensive and potentially painful,” she said. “To minimize that painfulness, we really need to be investing in adaptation technologies.”