🧃Aardvark Eats the Weather Models

Welcome to The Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s not afraid to ask the hard questions, like: why do we need a Cray supercomputer to tell us it’s going to rain, when an aardvark could do it instead?

While AI’s been busy selling you slightly better ads and slightly worse essays, a group of researchers at the Alan Turing Institute has been teaching it something useful: predicting the weather. Their new model, charmingly called Aardvark, might sound like a Pixar side character, but it could seriously shake up how the world prepares for storms, floods, and droughts.

A pocket-sized revolution in forecasting

Most weather predictions today rely on physics-based models crunched on supercomputers the size of a studio apartment (and just as expensive). They take in trillions of data points and simulate the atmosphere using decades of meteorological equations. Powerful? Yes. Efficient? Not exactly.

Aardvark skips that whole phase. It’s what’s called an “end-to-end” AI model — it hoovers up raw data from satellites, sensors, and stations and spits out weather forecasts directly. No huge simulations, no need for energy-guzzling infrastructure. It runs on hardware you’d find in a decent gaming PC. That means it can be deployed where it’s needed most: developing countries without billion-dollar budgets or server farms in the Alps.

Democratising the downpour

Forecasting is global, but access to accurate local forecasts isn’t. That’s a problem — especially for regions like West Africa, where livelihoods rely heavily on being able to predict a few weeks out whether rain is coming or crops are dying. Large-scale patterns in the region’s climate actually make longer-range forecasting easier than in, say, Europe or the US. But until now, no one’s had the tools to take advantage of that.

If adapted to local contexts, Aardvark could help farmers in Senegal better predict peanut harvests or warn coastal cities about flood risks. Researchers compared its impact to the arrival of mobile phones in the Global South — not just a new gadget, but a leapfrog moment.

Free, fast, and (almost) ready

While most of the Big Tech weather models — think Google DeepMind or Nvidia — are proprietary, Aardvark is fully open source. That’s partly thanks to backing from the Alan Turing Institute, Cambridge University, and even Microsoft, which for once doesn’t want to slap a price tag on it.

It’s still in testing mode, but Aardvark already outperforms the US government’s Global Forecast System on key variables. Scientists say it’ll need more development before it can fully replace the high-resolution tools meteorological agencies rely on. But for communities currently flying blind, it doesn’t need to be perfect — just better than nothing.

The takeaway
Aardvark might not solve the weather, but by shrinking the hardware and opening up access, it’s giving more of the world a fighting chance to stay one step ahead of it.