WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model

Reminds me of a funny WWII story:

Kenneth Arrow and his statisticians found that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat. The forecasters agreed and asked their superiors to be relieved of this duty. The reply was: "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However he needs them for planning purposes."

Im pretty deep into this topic and what might be interesting to an outsider is that the leading models like neuralgcm/weathernext 1 before as well as this model now are all trained with a "crps" objective which I haven't seen at all outside of ml weather prediction.

Essentially you add random noise to the inputs and train by minimizing the regular loss (like l1) and at the same time maximizing the difference between 2 members with different random noise initialisations. I wonder if this will be applied to more traditional genai at some point.

I find it interesting that they quantify the improvement on speed and number of forecast-ed scenarios but lack details on how it results in improved accuracy of the forecast per:

``` WeatherNext 2 can generate forecasts 8x faster and with resolution up to 1-hour. This breakthrough is enabled by a new model that can provide hundreds of possible scenarios. ```

As an end user, all I care is that there's one accurate forecasted scenario.

Where can I use this? I’ve been trying to find hyperlocal forecasts like darksky used to be.

It feels like real weather AI|Forecast|whatever_you_want_to_call_it is still far, far away. Maybe it's just the consumer aspect of weather apps but I don't feel as if I get any more accurate data now than I did back when my parents turned to the daily weather channel for the forecast. Still a lot of clear days when rain was predicted or the even more dreaded torrential downpour when it was supposed to be sunny and clear.

Obviously all I have is anecdata for what I'm mentioning here but from a consumer perspective I don't feel like these model enhancements are really making average folks feel as if weather is any more understood than it was decades ago.

Is this the same model as provided the most accurate hurricane predictions this season?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-...

WeatherNext 2 sounds impressive! An advanced weather forecasting model like this can really improve accuracy and help with better planning for both businesses and individuals.

Is anyone aware of good sources of higher resolution models? Hourly resolution like this model provides doesn’t help much now that energy markets have moved to 15-min and 5-min resolution.

Anyone know whether we can use this to simulate hurricanes/floods in particular areas, instead of looking at real existing data and helping model an existing hurricane as it's happening? (which is definitely more important and impactful, but the simulation angle is the one I happen to be curious about at the moment).

Like if I wanted to simulate whether something like Hurricane Melissa would've gone through a handful of southern US states, what would the effect have been, from an insurance or resiliency standpoint.

Pricing, I think?

https://developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/prici...

15 years later and still no word from Google if they will use the barometers in Android devices to assimilate surface pressure data. It has been shown that this can improve forecast accuracy. I think IBM may be doing it with their weather apps, but Google/Apple would have dramatically more data available.

Apple even bought Dark Sky, which purported to do this but never released any information - so I doubt they really did do it. And if they did, I doubt Apple continued the practice.

Been waiting a long time to hear Google announce they'll use your barometer to give you a better forecast. Still waiting I guess.

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This year, the wild variance in hourly weather reports on my phone has really been something. I attributed it to likely budget cuts as a result of DOGE, but if those forecasts came from Google itself the whole time, all is clear now.