Google's New AI Weather Forecaster Updates Every Hour, Straight From Satellite Pictures

Google today released WeatherNext 3, an AI program that forecasts the weather for the whole planet. Instead of waiting on the big computer simulations most forecasts start from, it reads live satellite pictures and makes a fresh forecast every hour, in much finer detail than Google's last version. It will power the weather you see in Google Search and Google Maps.

Google's AI research lab, Google DeepMind, working with Google Research, today released WeatherNext 3, a new AI program that forecasts the weather around the whole globe.

Most weather forecasts today begin with a huge computer simulation: the physics of the atmosphere worked out step by step on a supercomputer, refreshed every six hours. Google's earlier AI forecasters learned from that kind of simulation. The new one works differently. It looks directly at a live, stitched-together picture of the Earth from weather satellites that hover over fixed spots on the planet, and it produces a new forecast every hour, each one built on the latest images. Google says that cuts the wait between what the satellites see and a usable forecast to three or four hours, from roughly seven.

It also sees in finer detail. For things like temperature and moisture near the ground, it forecasts for squares about 5 kilometers (3 miles) across, which Google says is roughly five times sharper than its previous model. It predicts rain and snow, cloud cover, sunshine, and wind speeds about 100 meters (330 feet) up, the height of a wind turbine, which matters to anyone running a wind or solar farm.

Google says the new model forecasts rain and snow more accurately than before, by as much as 60% when checked against one satellite-based record of rainfall and by smaller amounts against others, and that people planning a day or more ahead get up to 50% more accurate rain forecasts. Those figures come from Google's own testing.

WeatherNext 3 will run the weather features in Google Search, the Gemini chatbot and Google Maps, and businesses and researchers can use its data through Google's cloud services. Google is also clear about its limits: for official forecasts, severe weather warnings and safety advice, it tells people to go to their local or national weather service.