Top
Best
New

Posted by matthieu_bl 4 days ago

WeatherNext 3(deepmind.google)
Paper [pdf]: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/papers/weather...
324 points | 78 commentspage 2
NostraDavid 1 day ago|
In the energy world, this should be such a boon over the classic NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction; complex ML models), but I've not seen it implementated. Anyone with experience of these models over classic NWP?
niltecedu 1 hour ago||
Its not there because a lot of the providers werent providing until recently, and higher spatial resolutions, referesh times and higher compute costs meant that no one used them in prod. We tried with ECMWF-AIFS however ENS + IFS was bettter better.
counters 13 hours ago|||
Why should they be such a boon? High-resolution, regional NWP with fast refresh has been a standard tool for over a decade.
BlackRabbit1 14 hours ago||
A few weather forecast sites in Europe have them on their websites. It's just another forecast you can select and compare in an ensemble.

Problem is that the WN3 grid is still quite rough (5km) - but a that's a brutal improvement for many places compared to many other global models.

Quite a few country-scale models go down to a 1-2km grid nowadays. This is very helpful in complex geography like mountains and alleys.

counters 13 hours ago|||
> Problem is that the WN3 grid is still quite rough (5km) - but a that's a brutal improvement for many places compared to many other global models.

That's a pretty apples-and-oranges comparison. One would almost always use a high-resolution regional model if you needed certain details for different forecasting applications like renewable energy.

It's also worth noting that the 5km outputs are from a model decoder head that was trained against temperature and dewpoint at surface stations. According to the Rasp et al (2026) preprint, this head was designed for continuous sampling; the choice of a 5km grid is arbitrary. What we don't actually know is how well the model handles shocks like a frontal passage or impacts from things like outflow from storms - or even evaporative cooling from precipitation. We are limited to the output that DeepMind publishes; we can't run the model and stress test these things on our own.

That's all a long way to say that the 5km resolution is (a) limited to temperature fields, and (b) we don't know if the "additional" resolution has any impact whatsoever on the phenomena that one would typically use a mesoscale-resolving forecast for.

dist-epoch 13 hours ago|||
You could use this model as another input into the country-scale models.
anakaine 13 hours ago||
This would not likely be a great idea since you reduce your ability to understand inputs except for a few parameters. Explainable inputs become very important for many down the line processes used by government and industry alike, because said inputs and their predictive certainty can be quite informative, even critical, for accurate mesoscale prediction.

If model members were available, with all the usual measures, thats a fantastic place to start looking at serious inclusion. It doesnt seem thats the case, however.

anakaine 13 hours ago||
The online viewer could really, really use Wind Direction as a compass bearing. Its super important considering wildfire/bushfire, air quality, ocean-going conditions, and a myriad of other things. It is produced as a set of vectors during model creation, so would be very useful to see.
bahmboo 12 hours ago|
I agree but this seems like a demo for the underlying data set. The data is the product and they want to sell or use it downstream.
tomrod 6 hours ago||
Sweet. This will be a great layer for our hazard prediction engine.
ankithg 8 hours ago||
[flagged]
paidx 9 hours ago||
[flagged]
tcumulus 4 days ago||
Paper: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/papers/weather...

TLDR: the input data for the model now also includes real-time observations (satellite and weather stations) on top of the typical (re)analysis data, improving model resolution, run frequency and timestep frequency.

dang 14 hours ago|
We'll put that link in the toptext as well. Thanks!
spareloom 8 hours ago||
[flagged]
SadErn 10 hours ago|
[dead]