15/09/2026
In August, two of the most senior leaders in global weather forecasting visited our Vantaa headquarters: ECMWF (The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts) Director General Dr. Florian Pappenberger and Deputy Director General Dr. Irina Sandu.
The question driving the conversation: as AI takes on more of the forecasting, what happens to the data underneath it?
Part of our answer sat right in the room: the RM60, our newest precipitation sensor. It runs maintenance-free and measures drop-size distribution directly on the ground, exactly the kind of dense, precise data that AI weather models need to train on. Rain and snow remain some of the hardest things to forecast globally, simply because they vary so much from place to place. Pappenberger, a hydrologist by training, took a close look at it himself.
Pappenberger and Sandu were accompanied by Vaisala CEO Kai Öistämö, Anne Jalkala, who leads Weather, Energy and Environment at Vaisala, and Samuli Hänninen, who leads Xweather.
The more forecasting leans on AI, the more it will depend on getting the ground truth right.