National Weather Service

Headlines · 2

1. 1d
   Developer reports XGBoost forecasts county power outages two hours ahead

   A developer built an hourly XGBoost system for 216 counties in Missouri and Illinois that estimates the probability of at least 5% of a county’s customers newly losing power during a six-hour window beginning two hours ahead. The model uses issued HRRR storm forecasts, county-specific information, current outages and neighboring-county data. It was trained on 2020–2024 and tested on 2025. The developer reported a PR-AUC of 0.094, compared with 0.039 for a rate-table baseline using National Weather Service warnings and Storm Prediction Center Day 1 outlooks. At equal alert volume, the developer reported catching 30% of new outages versus 17%, with 15% precision versus 11%. The base rate was 0.5% of county-hours. An early transfer test reportedly caught 31% versus 19% in Iowa, Indiana and Michigan.

   r/MachineLearning · 🔥 2
2. Oct 12
   WindBorne wins US Air Force contract worth up to $49M for balloon data

   WindBorne Systems has secured a US Air Force contract worth up to roughly $49 million under which the military buys atmospheric readings from its global fleet of autonomous weather balloons on demand. The award was made without competitive bidding; the Air Force has so far placed orders worth about $1.7 million and can request data for specific regions and time windows. WindBorne operates about 700 balloons whose measurements are sold to customers and also feed its WeatherMesh 6 deep-learning forecasting model, which the company says outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' physics-based model — a claim not independently verified here.

   TechCrunch AI · 🔥 0

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