Training program to strengthen forecasting in low- and middle-income countries

HCF, UChicago’s AI for Climate Initiative(AICE), and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), with support from AIM for Scale, have launched a training program to strengthen AI-driven weather forecasting capabilities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

This program engages with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) and agriculture ministries for the production and evaluation of farmer-focused forecasts to support forecast integration into operational end-to-end early warning pipelines and make alerts more useful for decision-makers on the ground. The HCF and AICE teams developed the training materials and interactive hands-on demos to run and evaluate AI weather forecast models, in collaboration with the MBZUAI team, who hosted the first in-person training in Abu Dhabi, along with the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology (NCM), between September 22-26.

To devise the technical content of the training program, the University of Chicago coordinated a steering committee, which included expert input from the World Meteorological Organization, European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and Google. Outputs from the training program include bringing together international experts from multidisciplinary fields to not only run forecasts, but to also collaborate on ways to evaluate them, using local data in a way that prioritizes tests of regional use cases of interest to the agricultural sector. Outsider expert engagement included participation from AfriClimate AI, Google DeepMind, G42 Inception, MetNorway, Precision for Development, Rhiza Research, and TAHMO. 

The program has been launched in 2025 in partnership with 5 countries (Bangladesh, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria). We plan to partner with 10 more countries in 2026 and 15 more in 2027–reaching a total of 30 countries and, ultimately, broadening reach and impact to potentially millions more farmers.

Learn more