Lightning kills roughly 2,500 people in India every year, often more than floods, heat and cold combined. An actionable alert system that saves lives needs excellent modelling.
A modern weather model represents the atmosphere with about a billion numbers, estimated from a few tens of millions of scattered, indirect observations arguably the most successful inverse problem in science.
We trace how this intellectual and social infrastructure was built: from Richardson's 1922 hand calculation, to neural networks trained on the reconstructed past that now match the physical models.
Lightning is…

Hosted by Team Lossfunk, Jay Joshi & Paras Chopra