Introducing the artificial meteorologist
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Data from 2018 to 2022. Hey there, and thanks for listening. We want to know more about our audience. Stick around at the end of this episode to hear about how you can help provide feedback and have a chance to walk away with a $75 gift card. Introducing the artificial meteorologist...

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, a roll of steel or aluminum from another country purchased for $1,000 gets a $500 import duty at the U.S. border starting now. That's double the previous tax, so a $1,000 item now costs the importer $1,500.

It's the latest of President Trump's volley of tariffs, one that uses a strategy that does not face a pressing possibility of being overturned in court. Marketplace's Henry Epp has more. Manufacturers aren't just going to switch to domestic suppliers, says Erin McLaughlin, senior economist at the conference board, because those suppliers can't expand steel and aluminum factories overnight. That takes years. You

You need capital, you need labor, you need good infrastructure. All of those things are sort of under constraint right now.

So she says for now, a lot of companies will try to delay any big orders to see if the tariffs actually stick around. But there will come a time when they need that inventory and they will have to purchase it and it will be at a higher price. And she says they'll pass at least some of that extra cost ultimately to U.S. consumers. But the impact won't just be felt by companies that sell to Americans, says Jason Miller at Michigan State University.

The biggest concern is the impact it has on the export market for the U.S. Because manufacturers that export have to compete with companies in other countries. For example, a European machinery company, Miller says. This European machinery manufacturer is not paying these inflated costs of materials. And so all things equal, that European manufacturer is now more competitive in

which hurts U.S. manufacturers selling in global markets. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace. The White House is working to formalize some funding cuts it's been pursuing. Yesterday, it asked Congress to rescind, to pull back more than $9 billion. That includes funding for foreign aid and public TV and radio. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer joins me now live. How's it going to work?

Well, David, this formal process of taking money back Congress already appropriated is called rescission. And since Congress has the power of the purse, only lawmakers can officially take money back. The rescission process is laid out in a law. Once the president sends a rescission request to Congress, the clock starts ticking and lawmakers have 45 days to approve it. They only need a simple majority, though, and that avoids a Senate filibuster.

Nancy, we know the rescission request pulls back money already allocated to public broadcasting. How much? Yeah, about a billion dollars would be taken back from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public radio and PBS. The remaining eight billion or so would come from cuts to foreign aid. And that reportedly includes money for things like reproductive health and support for LGBTQ communities. And is Congress likely to go along with this?

Well, lawmakers usually reject rescission requests. After all, they're the ones who approved the funding in the first place. But this request has House Speaker Mike Johnson's support. In a social media post, he said it'll be on the House floor next week. Some moderate Republicans in the Senate may object, though.

All right, Nancy, thank you. President Trump informed the world that negotiating with China's leader is not a walk in the park. Here's the post, quote, I like President Xi of China, always have, always will, but he is very tough and extremely hard to make a deal with. That last clause is in all caps and ends with three exclamation points. A White House spokesperson said there will be a direct Trump-Xi talk, quote, very soon.

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Microsoft has unveiled a weather forecasting approach that makes its predictions using artificial intelligence. Google, NVIDIA, and Huawei all are using AI to try to make weather predictions more precise. And as hurricane season gets underway, Daniel Ackerman explains what it could mean for the economy. For years, weather forecasting has been based on physics. That means millions of calculations about how heat and moisture move through the atmosphere. But these new AI models...

Most of them don't have any physics in them at all. Amy McGovern is a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. She says that while the AI forecasts don't know much about how weather works, they're great at recognizing patterns. They're trained on 40 or 50 years of data. And so they are learning, given some amount of history, what's going to happen next. And she says they're pretty good at that, often on par with or better than traditional forecasts. And since they're not doing all those physics calculations...

McGovern says that could give people more lead time before a storm. You could move your car into a garage. But she says the AI models still have room for improvement. Some

Some are not great at predicting small-scale local events like tornadoes, says Renato Molina, an environmental economist at the University of Miami. They're still pretty far, particularly when it comes to predicting wind speeds. And that also applies to hurricane forecasting, where predicting wind speed matters. Because that's one of the key drivers of damage.

Still, the companies behind these new AI models are betting they'll come to reliably outperform traditional forecasts, and that's something plenty of customers would be willing to pay for. Customers like insurance companies, says Tatiana Derugina, a finance professor at the University of Illinois.

Because seemingly small differences in the model can make big differences for insurers' bottom line. And if you're not modeling the risk granularly enough, you could be on the line to lose a lot of money. Ultimately, though, Darugina says the success of this forecasting will depend in part on whether people trust AI to do the job.

If people are going to decide whether they evacuate or not, how much they trust the forecast is going to matter. DeRugan says a forecast that no one acts on is not a very useful one. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. And in Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio. You're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report, and we're from APM American Public Media.

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