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Posted by bhavansig 8 hours ago

DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones(deepmind.google)
280 points | 87 comments
tcumulus 3 hours ago|
Everything in AI seems to be focused on LLMs lately. But in my opinion, powerful problem-specific models like this are even more interesting. The SOTA AI models used in weather forecasting are already outperforming the classic NWP models while being orders of magnitude more efficient (inference). Most are based on multi scale (hierarchical) Graph Neural Networks, an architecture which is not often talked about. The original Graphcast paper is worth a read if you think this is interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12794
polairscience 3 hours ago||
You say this as if you don't need he MWP models to train the AI models? The accuracy of the AI Prediction depends entirely on the quality of the training dataset...
geertj 3 hours ago|||
I would imagine this would be trained on actual historical weather data instead?
sunshinesnacks 3 hours ago|||
Pretty much all of the AI weather prediction models are trained on ECMWF ERA5, which is kinda like a numerical weather prediction model run to forecast at t=0. ERA5 is historical weather data, but it’s a “reanalysis” of it.
tcumulus 2 hours ago||
Indeed, you can imagine this as some sort of advanced physics-based interpolation of various measurements (land stations, satellite data, ...) to fill in every cell in a latitude-longitude grid. This is not only used for ERA5 (training data for the models), but also to determine the initial conditions for every grid cell which are used to roll out the forecast. So AI weather models depend greatly on the NWP/physics used in for reanalysis and initial conditions. That being said, there is also research being conducted in training models straight from the raw data (weather stations, satellite, ...), thus bypassing the "interpolation" step.
sunshinesnacks 1 hour ago||
Yeah. I can’t remember names off the top of my head, but there are a few companies, and I think many researchers, working on AI “data assimilation” for this.
plantain 3 hours ago||||
Historical weather data is discrete. You need continuous state for weather modelling which is currently achieved through conventional reforecasts using those historical observations.
RandomLensman 3 hours ago|||
From a quick read: ECMWF and IBTrACS data - the former is model based (with measurement data crunched), the latter purely observational.
Onavo 9 minutes ago|||
A more interesting question is...does differential equations based models like mamba/state space models perform better on this sort of physics problem than pure transformer LLMs?
WarmWash 2 hours ago|||
Rumor is that part of the disruption at GDM these past few months also involved people not wanting to be bound to strictly LLM research.
hammock 40 minutes ago|||
Is there any website publishing these forecasts? I imagine NWS/NOAA isn’t doing anything different yet on their public websites.
timeisapear 24 minutes ago||
Yes. AIFS directly by ECMWF and AIGEFS by NOAA. Every vibecoded weather app these days has them. Google those terms you’ll find them.
rumblefrog 22 minutes ago||
Anything more daily human friendly/consumable?
amarcheschi 1 hour ago|||
One of my professors is referenced in the Wikipedia page of graph neural networks. It's funny that he explained them in the worse way possible and I eventually understood them better with another professor
numbers_guy 2 hours ago|||
I can assure you that anyone who touches numerical simulations of any kind (physicists, engineers, chemists, biophysicts...etc) has tried their hand at ML based surrogate models in the last 5 years, so it's not like they aren't being tested. From my experience, they aren't very robust. Weather modeling is actually one of the very few areas where it seems to work half decently.
testfoobar 38 minutes ago||
Why does it work for weather at all? Is there something that the mathematical models are over-simulating? Is weather easier to predict than we thought? Just curious what the intuition is to regarding the success of ML weather modelling...
segmondy 1 hour ago|||
everything in AI is not focused on LLM, if you think so then that's because you are in LLM bubble. The big idea with LLM is that it's generative AI, the generative could be anything! Not just large languages, we have seen break through in image generation, video, audio, but guess what. Anything that you have enough data and given data you can predict what comes next can have gen AI applied, so we are seeing it with physical actions so robots get trained to generate the next move, and I think the same thing applies to weather forecast. It's predictable too given enough data
KennyBlanken 39 minutes ago|||
Everything in the western world isn't focused on LLM. The top western players are heavily focused on AGI.

Meanwhile the Chinese are using LLMs and other non-AGI AI tech at the edge wherever they think to put it for task-specific productivity or optimization. They don't really care about AGI, or more accurately: they're working on getting their society more efficient and decarbonized, and then they'll be free to work on AGI with far fewer resources.

OpenAI, Anthropic, et al are working toward someday having AGI, and if they ever do, when they do, the Chinese will be hopelessly far ahead of us on energy, manufacturing, logistics (especially low/zero carbon transport of goods and people) and so on.

Once the Chinese figure out how to train an AI for ULEV lithography, especially once they figure out how to train it for semiconductor design or validation - it's game over for the semiconductor industry, and the big AI players will follow, because they won't possibly be able to compete against a Chinese version of NVIDIA with TSMC-like capabilities, or Chinese AI companies running on those much cheaper chips, with cheap, zero carbon power.

pbronez 3 hours ago||
Insightful paper, thanks for sharing. Two things stand out to me.

First, it reinforces that you want methods that get better with more data. It emphasizes that the current approach cannot improve based on historic data - that’s the opportunity that ML based approaches exploit.

Second, it highlights that mature legacy solutions are tough competitors. They benefit from extensive tuning and real world feedback. Even when you have a genuinely better approach, it will take meaningful time & effort to achieve the current standard.

Patience and solid long term strategy are needed to make progress in these situations. You need confidence that your approach will win long term, backed by enough money & time to prove yourself correct.

fcanesin 4 hours ago||
Maybe was this that was the last drop for Sundar.

Demis: "I have a new amazing breakthrough"

Sundar: "Great! We really need a answer to Sol and Fable"

Demis: "They are completely owned in typhoon forecasting"

trescenzi 4 hours ago||
Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.
esperent 3 hours ago|||
How does predicting a typhoon prevent billions in damage?

It could save thousands of lives because people can be evacuated if you can predict a few hours or a day further ahead, or the path more accurately. You can save some damage by moving ships and vehicles.

But you can't evacuate buildings or infrastructure.

baq 2 hours ago||
You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days. Crucially, you can move more of the most expensive stuff out of the storm surge zone, which is where the biggest damage happens and try to flood proof more of the things which can’t be moved.
esperent 2 hours ago||
> You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days

TFA says they might be able to predict one extra day ahead (three days instead of two). No prediction system will ever give you a week's notice on a typhoon.

TaupeRanger 18 minutes ago|||
Actually it doesn't even say that - they claim to have the same "accuracy" at 3 days that older methods have at 2 days. What does that actually get you? Were the older models so much less accurate at 3 days (compared to 2) that it prevented evacuation of key areas? Looking at the paper, it doesn't really seem like this can be answered yet because there's not enough data over a long enough time.

Keep in mind, DeepMind has a very well documented history of releasing enormously hyped up PR pieces with grandiose claims that are never backed up in real world usage, or are simply lies.

hammock 38 minutes ago||||
Why couldn’t we get a week?
Angostura 1 hour ago|||
30% more time to know exactly where to board up etc. seems very significant
dylan604 1 hour ago|||
Wouldn't it be 50% more time?
xyzzy123 3 hours ago||||
I know this is uncharitable and I am wrong but I am having trouble coming up with concrete scenarios where you die with 2 days notice but survive with 3. I am nonethless a believer that more accurate forecasting has value.
TaupeRanger 9 minutes ago|||
It's not uncharitable, because the system doesn't actually claim to give you an extra day of notice. It would be more accurate to say: "the model can reach a given level of forecast accuracy roughly a day farther in advance". So your question becomes: are there scenarios where I am 80% sure this is a Cat 5 hurricane 3 days before, where I would die if I was only 65% sure it was Cat 5 on that same day? The answer is - probably not, because even in the example used in the PR article, the NHC was already issuing strong early guidance 5 days before landfall.
baq 2 hours ago||||
You can walk 50km in those extra 24 hours which will save your life if you’re in a storm surge area without other means of transportation, which is easily the case when everyone else is evacuating alongside you.
IanCal 3 hours ago||||
Could you imagine a scenario where from warning to complete evacuation takes more than two days? Evacuating a whole area is a hard task, particularly once you start looking at more complex problems (elderly, prisons, hospitals).
xyzzy123 3 hours ago|||
I feel like the details of this are highly dependent on the confidence of the warning; moving large numbers of people (particularly elderly) will result in some deaths regardless. I guess more time to do it should help though.
metanoia_ 3 hours ago||||
Hurricane Maria went from Cat 2 to Cat 5 in less than 24 hours, and turned making a direct hit to Dominica in 2017.
michaelbuckbee 3 hours ago||||
The 2 vs 3 days makes less of an impact on personal decision making but has massive benefits for decision making at the country wide response level.
treis 2 hours ago||||
I don't think the amount of notice is as important as "this totally is for sure going to wreck you" is. We generally know something is going to hit somewhere at sometime. Which isn't specific enough for everyone to act on
rcpt 37 minutes ago||||
Hurricane blast radius is very small
farco12 3 hours ago||||
You live on a chain of small islands and travel by boat.
scarmig 3 hours ago||||
Imagine you've got to evacuate a hundred thousand people. That extra day is incredibly valuable.
MagicMoonlight 3 hours ago|||
[dead]
sweezyjeezy 4 hours ago||||
Valuable, agreed. But lucrative?
gniv 4 hours ago|||
Are Sol and Fable lucrative? I suspect they also are valuable (to clients) but not lucrative (yet).
quicekuru 3 hours ago||
I think both have value, but in opposite ways. While WeatherNext prevents costs, models like fable or sol "create profit".

I can think of 10 examples how one could make money with fable. With WeatherNext? Only 10 examples of preventing costs.

Taking this, maybe naive, thought further, profits have no upper limit (except resources) while costs can only save so much?

gniv 1 hour ago||
Yes of course. My comment was facetious.
gpm 2 hours ago||||
Trade agricultural futures based on it maybe?
allannienhuis 3 hours ago|||
I've always assumed that insurance and/or government departments that would spend money due to storms would be the ones funneling money to these sorts of efforts. It's not exactly something you can easily sell directly to individuals who would benefit. It would be pretty dystopian for them to sell subscriptions for an extra 24 hrs notice on the next typhoon :P
teravor 29 minutes ago||||
by giving it away they capture none of the value except for some PR.
davoneus 3 hours ago|||
I agree, but the shareholder mentality undervalues the heck out of that.
purplemoonx 3 hours ago||
[flagged]
dgellow 4 hours ago||
This is really cool, please more of this from the AI folks! That’s way more impactful and interesting than another coding agent
jen729w 5 hours ago||
I just discovered typhoon/cyclone predictions and they're insane. I get mine via https://zoom.earth (whose iPhone app is terrific).

Here's a selection from Typhoon Dolphin, currently sitting off the east coast of China.

    Dolphin continues its slow, trochoidal Z motion, generally heading westward deeper into the East China Sea. Over the past 12 hours, the system completed another cyclonic loop and has decelerated, exhibiting continued meandering prior to establishing a sustained westward track.

    The erratic motion witnessed over the past two days is attributable to a weak steering environment produced by a break in the subtropical ridge 2 over Korea, combined with the dynamics where the inner core is cocooned within a much larger parent circulation.

    While the general steering pattern is weak, a mesoscale deep-layer ridge is seen building over southern Japan.
https://zoom.earth/storms/dolphin-2026/

Here's Chan-hom, which threatens to make my birthday a windy day here in northern Japan.

    Intensity guidance is in good agreement overall. However, the JTWC forecast is placed lower than all the guidance save for Google DeepMind over the next 36 hours, before joining the consensus envelope (which peaks at 95 km/h (50 knots) at 60 hours) through the remainder of the forecast.
https://zoom.earth/storms/chan-hom-2026/
trescenzi 4 hours ago|
If you’re just getting into this tropical tidbits[0] is my go to for more raw data. Less pretty than zoom earth but also an interesting place to see what the models are predicting on each of their runs which is then interesting to compare to actual forecast guidance.

1: https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/

algo_trader 3 hours ago|||
I am getting into cyclone predictions (for maritime scheduling)

Is there a basic/freemium resource for past events? Mostly just very coarse spatial/temporal maps of past events

netcraft 3 hours ago|||
For atlantic basin hurricanes (and the occasional one that could impact Hawaii he also does fantastic youtube videos
ObscureScience 34 minutes ago||
It would be interesting to research more into parameter analysis to learn more about what parameters a trained network has "extracted" that has the strongest predictive power; assuming the model itself has such preductive power. I guess I'm imagining some kind of alternative to embeddings where you get answers like: Predicted percipitation P(accumulated humidity over n days, net wind vector over n days, humity today, temperature today, ...)
wafngar 1 hour ago||
Seems to be the same methodology as the ECMWF AI ENS operational since mid last year:

https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwfs...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-026-00073-7

bhavansig 8 hours ago||
From the tagline in the article: "WeatherNext enables accurate cyclone forecasts that can give an extra day of warning. Now we are open sourcing the model."
purplemoonx 3 hours ago||
Predicting big weather events is not that hard even with 50 year old technology.

What's hard is predicting details, like exactly where it will rain, what the slope of the beach is today (many people don't even know this changes drastically daily and why it is important), wave height, ocean depth today where people swim, water temperature, shorebreak, and knowing with certainty when rain becomes ice/sleet/snow and what routes will be affected, accurate wind speed, accurate temperature throughout different parts of the region, and what the weather next week will be.

We can't do any of those things with conventional equipment, but we can with training data and algorithms. So I'm very excited about the role of algorithmic prediction in weather, but not for the kind we already know how to forecast (without AI) but being able to glean useful insights that matter to people who live, work and play in the weather.

vasco 2 hours ago|
> what the slope of the beach is today (many people don't even know this changes drastically daily and why it is important

So why is it important? As far as I know the slope changes AFTER the weather not before as a prediction mechanism but happy to learn

kashifr 2 hours ago||
Check out my pytorch reproduction of the paper here for those interested: https://github.com/NVIDIA/physicsnemo/pull/1660
ElijahLynn 43 minutes ago|
What a beautiful outcome of this age of AI!!! And they are open sourcing it too!!

#HappyNews

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