Hurricanes and sandstorms can be forecast 5,000 times faster thanks to new Microsoft AI model

A digital render of a hurricane on a computer screen.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model can predict major weather events faster and more accurately than some of the world's most widely used forecasting systems.

The model, called Aurora, is trained on more than 1 million hours of global atmospheric data, including weather station readings, satellite images and radar measurements. Scientists at Microsoft say it's likely the largest dataset ever used to train a weather AI model.