Google detailed its latest AI-powered weather forecasting model this morning, announcing that it’s already rolling out to a handful of Google services that will utilize it the most.
Called WeatherNext 3, users will find its forecasting inside of Google Search, Gemini, Maps, the broader Google Maps Platform, and Google Cloud. But how does it differ from WeatherNext 2? Quite greatly, but I’ll leave Google to explain that part.
“WeatherNext 3’s biggest leap forward is what it learns from. Most AI weather models, including WeatherNext 2, are trained on data from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Although useful, NWP models are complex, supercomputer-driven physics simulations that carry a six-hour data lag. This lag can lead to biases for fast-changing variables like rain or surface temperature.
By ingesting a mosaic of live, global geostationary satellite data, our new model gains a rich, continuously updating view of the atmosphere. This allows the model to generate a new forecast every hour, each one grounded in the most recent satellite observations available, at up to 5-kilometer resolution.”
Google wrote a whole paper on WeatherNext 3 which you can read here. If reading seems like a bit much, there’s a video detailing the changes in this AI model below.
I’m all for better weather forecasts.
