As we mark Climate Week, one of the starkest signals of climate change in New York is the increasing frequency with which dangerous storms strike our communities. From the tornadoes that ripped through Rome and Buffalo in July and August to the flash floods that swept across eastern Long Island last month, we must use every tool available to help us adapt and make our communities safer and more resilient. Increasingly, that means leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. John Holdren, a former climate adviser to President Obama, once famously said humanity has three choices when it comes to climate change: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. AI has the power to help us with the first two so that we can minimize the third. AI is already advancing our ability to protect life and property and to improve the efficacy of other technologies, like renewable power generation, that will help to mitigate the impacts of climate change for future generations. New York’s landmark investment in the Empire AI initiative, and before that UAlbany’s AI Plus initiative, will only amplify the power of this science. For example, my colleagues at the University at Albany have partnered with major utilities like Con Ed to develop algorithms that harness vast troves of weather data to better forecast load demand across the electrical grid in the New York City area. Understanding and managing how much electricity is likely to be needed on a given day is critical as urban summers get hotter and as New York State pushes ahead with its nation-leading goals for electrification and clean energy. This isn’t just a matter of comfort. Extreme heat is the deadliest form of weather in the U.S., claiming on average nearly twice as many lives each year as flooding. We’re also using machine learning to help electric utilities train computer models to synthesize the weather forecast and better predict power outages before they happen based on the known impacts of past storms and the latest weather forecasts. This helps utilities prepare their response sooner and get the power back on faster, and it also helps them provide more accurate estimates to consumers for when power will be restored. Just this summer, our colleagues have been deploying high-tech sensors along major electric transmission and delivery infrastructure in Puerto Rico to collect more granular data and develop AI-powered predictive models for when the power grid is most vulnerable. This will support efforts to harden the grid to make it more resilient to weather extremes. At the same time, we’re using AI to help improve the accuracy and timeliness of the underlying forecasts themselves — improving the intelligence available to utilities and the state’s emergency managers in those critical hours before and during a weather emergency. One colleague is using deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that mimics the way a human brain makes decisions, to provide short-term forecasts for potentially damaging winds, which is essential to the operation of wind farms. The common thread across each of these projects is that they help New Yorkers mitigate or adapt to the impacts of climate change, and AI is essential to all of them. This is true of most science conducted with artificial intelligence. AI is not the end itself. It is a tool that helps tackle challenges of such scale and complexity that the solution might otherwise remain beyond our grasp. Climate change, and how we adapt to it, is exactly that kind of problem. A recent report by the Bezos Earth Fund co-authored by some of my UAlbany colleagues noted that while technology alone will not solve these problems, it holds incredible potential “to dramatically accelerate the pace of solutions.” That means New York’s commitment to leading on climate change must, in addition to forward-thinking policies, include investing in the technologies that make those policies possible. While we’re making progress in the clean energy and meteorology space, access to the kind of supercomputing power provided by Empire AI will revolutionize our work by reducing the amount of time research takes from months or even years to a matter of days. That’s the real significance of New York’s investment in Empire AI. It is not just an investment in machines. It is an investment in our talent and the solutions our researchers develop to solve urgent problems that future New Yorkers need us to solve. Thorncroft is the director of the University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center and the Center of Excellence in Weather & Climate Analytics.