Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella

Scientists at Google Deepmind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often.

WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google’s cloud platforms.

“This is going to be the first time that some of the core variables feed and power a lot of the Google products,” Samier Merchant, a Google senior staff engineer, told TechCrunch.

The new model has already proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, a utility for comparing AI forecasts built by the startup Brightband. It looks at metrics like temperature, windspeed, and humidity.

As well as beating out other deep-learning models built by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, it also beats traditional forecasts from the US National Weather service and the ECMWF.

Most weather forecasts come from government-owned supercomputers laboriously churning through mathematical equations written to describe the physics of weather; while these systems have become remarkably accurate, they are expensive and comparatively slow. After the ECMWF released more than half a century of weather data produced by these systems in 2018, deep learning researchers began training models that could make predictions far more quickly and with comparable accuracy to government tools.