DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones

bbhavansig about 5 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on deepmind.google

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fcanesin•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.

xyzzy123•33 minutes 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.

IanCal•31 minutes 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).

michaelbuckbee•19 minutes 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.

metanoia_•27 minutes 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.

sweezyjeezy•about 1 hour ago

Valuable, agreed. But lucrative?

gniv•about 1 hour ago

Are Sol and Fable lucrative? I suspect they also are valuable (to clients) but not lucrative (yet).

allannienhuis•6 minutes 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

davoneus•39 minutes ago

I agree, but the shareholder mentality undervalues the heck out of that.

jen729w•about 2 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•about 1 hour 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/

netcraft•5 minutes ago

For atlantic basin hurricanes (and the occasional one that could impact Hawaii he also does fantastic youtube videos

algo_trader•8 minutes 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

bhavansig•about 5 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."

moktonar•about 2 hours ago

They should try to forecast earthquakes, that would really be a breakthrough If anything better than random comes out

mattlondon•about 1 hour ago

Google has the early warning system that gives people maybe 20-30s to e.g. turn off gas, stop vehicles, get under something solid. There was a lot of news recently about how this saved many thousands of lives in Venezuela I think it was.

But hey let's all keep shitting on Google because their coding agent is slightly worse than SOTA.

phoghed•about 1 hour ago

> But hey let's all keep shitting on Google because their coding agent is slightly worse than SOTA.

Reminder, we can do two or even more things. In fact, we can even simultaneously hold contradictory opinions.

Aboutplants•about 1 hour ago

This needs to be tied to a whole house shutoff system because if I get an alert I’m not thinking about shutting off my gas or water. Having a system that shut those off immediately would be great

talon8635•about 1 hour ago

This was my immediate hope too, as fault line resident

Yokolos•about 2 hours ago

Is this even feasible with our current sensor data?

snake_doc•about 1 hour ago

> We can now generate a single 15-day forecast in less than a minute on a TPU, empowering forecasters to quickly evaluate the probability distribution of potentially devastating tail-risks.

Crazy

derbOac•about 1 hour ago

"This has surprised scientists, and it remains an open research question to fully understand how our models produce such accurate predictions at this resolution."

Also crazy.

Seems important to understand why something does what it does, in the very least to know when it might not?

alpaca9•35 minutes ago

You can't, and it's one of the biggest problems when trying to use AI for anything.

pingou•about 2 hours ago

It seems especially useful for cargo ships, with better predictions they could save some fuel and be safer.

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Wake me up once commercial airplanes can take advantage of this and take us across the Atlantic in less than 5 hours.

fallingbananna•42 minutes ago

I don't mean to be disrespectful... but, why would you consider tech intended to save lives and resources less of a deal, than slightly faster flights over the Atlantic?

notfromhere•about 2 hours ago

planes fly above the weather, so kinda irrelevant. you can cross the atlantic fast with something like the Concorde

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

Well, that explains why even cyclones don't make us faster!

Obviously the technology I'm talking about would involve the planes going into the cyclone so plane can go faster.

hn974izqdv•about 1 hour ago

I keep relearning this every few months