China's AI weather agent being deployed globally

Francis Bassey Etim, technical adviser to the chairman at Nigeria's House Committee on Emergency and Disaster Preparedness, has been working with the Chinese team since last year.

"China's meteorological agencies have really advanced technologies, which we are here to learn. We hope to incorporate them into our own system to predict when floods are coming, see how we can control it, and most importantly, how we can come together to save lives and our ecosystems," said Etim during the training course in Shanghai.

"It (the AI agent) is not only a technology for today, but for the future. Hopefully when this agent comes to my country, we can have a team able to manage it. It's going to be beneficial to citizens and for a more sustainable future for us all," he added.

Last July, Shanghai donated the AI agent to meteorological authorities in Mongolia and Djibouti as part of its initial technology-sharing efforts. In October, the Zhang Qian Mission team flew to Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia, to install the system and conduct training. Entering this year, the training program has been expanding and the two sides are continuously exploring deeper into local conditions and system upgrading.

"We already started testing the system in our country and service, and it has helped us a lot to face the increasingly intense climate hazards such as floods, lightning, drought and desertification. It gave us many useful hints, and we hope to train the system to be more accurate and helpful," said Oyunjargal Lamjav, director of the weather forecasting department at Mongolia's National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring.

Liu Haobo, 39, team leader of the Zhang Qian Mission, has worked with the Mongolian team from the very start.

"Livestock populations support the economy and the lives of a very large number of Mongolian people. Early warnings are never only about sending alerts, but more about informing the priority groups promptly, so they can get prepared and take early actions to confront the disaster," said Liu, who hopes to leverage AI to help them come up with a customized solution to tackle the challenge of "dzuds".

According to Liu, the mission has received extensive feedback from international partners looking to tailor the platform to local infrastructure. Key engineering priorities now include leveraging AI to eliminate local language barriers, developing more efficient SMS text-alert distribution systems, and sharpening the geographic accuracy of early warning maps.

"They believe in us," Liu said. "Every time I see the confidence and trust in their eyes, I get powered up and filled with hope for the future."