Google AI Blog

Generative AI to quantify uncertainty in weather forecasting

Posted by Lizao (Larry) Li, Software Engineer, and Rob Carver, Research Scientist, Google Research Accurate weather forecasts can have a direct impact on people’s lives, from helping make routine decisions, like what to pack for a day’s activities, to informing urgent actions, for example, protecting people in the face of hazardous weather conditions. The importance of accurate and timely weather forecasts will only increase as the climate changes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

WeatherNext 3: Increasing resolution and performance of global weather models with raw observations

WeatherNext 3 is a new AI‑driven global weather model that improves both spatial and temporal resolution by generating hourly forecasts at 0.1° resolution, matching the best physics‑based models. It incorporates low‑latency geostationary satellite data and learns to predict satellite‑derived precipitation, tropical cyclones, and station observations, enabling 2 m temperature and dewpoint predictions anywhere and anytime. By directly using raw observations instead of relying solely on analysis data, WeatherNext 3 sets a new state‑of‑the‑art for probabilistic medium‑range forecasting skill.

By Stephan Rasp, Boris Babenko, Dominic Masters, Andrew El-Kadi, Samier Merchant, Guy Shalev, Ilan Price, Fred Zyda, Remi Lam, Sasha Shysheya, Matthew Willson, Stratis Markou, Shreya Agrawal, Suhani Vora, Mohammed Alewi Hassen, Sunny Mak, Tom R. Andersson, Megan Bela, Akib Uddin, Nofar Peled Levi, Ben Gaiarin, Ferran Alet, Aaron Bell, Peter Battaglia, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 13

Enhancing AI and Dynamical Subseasonal Forecasts with Probabilistic Bias Correction

arXiv:2604. 16238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decision-makers rely on weather forecasts to plant crops, manage wildfires, allocate water and energy, and prepare for weather extremes.

By Hannah Guan, Soukayna Mouatadid, Paulo Orenstein, Judah Cohen, Haiyu Dong, Zekun Ni, Jeremy Berman, Genevieve Flaspohler, Alex Lu, Jakob Schloer, Joshua Talib, Jonathan A. Weyn, Lester Mackey
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

GenONet: A Generative operator Network for High-Resolution Precipitation Nowcasting

GenONet introduces a Spatio-Temporal U-DeepONet architecture that serves as a generator in a GAN framework for high‑resolution precipitation nowcasting up to three hours ahead. By learning continuous‑time precipitation dynamics with a Deep Operator Network and enforcing physics through a moisture‑conservation loss, the model produces sharp, physically consistent forecasts that outperform baselines, especially for high‑intensity events and longer lead times. Ablation studies confirm the added value of the physics‑informed regularizer and the synergy of operator learning with adversarial training.

By Mohammad Kian Golkar, Luciano Alves de Oliveira, Mohammad Khanjani
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Improving global precipitation forecasts with an AI weather model trained on satellite observations

The paper presents Laxmi, a retrained version of the AIFS weather model that uses satellite-based precipitation observations instead of ERA5 reanalysis data. Laxmi achieves a 19% improvement in global probabilistic accuracy, reduces drizzle overprediction by 33%, and boosts the 95th percentile Brier skill score by 57%. In a case study of 10 Indian tropical storms, Laxmi accurately forecasted 150 mm event-total precipitation in 7 events, outperforming both the original AIFS and the leading physical model IFS.

By Julian F. Schmitt, Bertrand Delorme, Robert C. King, Yashica Patodia, Tapio Schneider, Aditi Sheshadri, Ravi Jain
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

AFDBench: A Reasoning-First AI Scientist for NationalWeather Service Forecast Discussions

AFDBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how well large language models can generate professional Area Forecast Discussions (AFDs) for the National Weather Service by reasoning through structured AI weather forecast data. It contains 7,732 expert-written discussions paired with real forecast inputs and introduces three metrics—Met-Align, Style-Align, and Input-Grounding—to assess numerical accuracy, professional dialect adherence, and fidelity to source data. Zero-shot tests show open-source LLMs perform poorly on style and grounding, but reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization nearly doubles style alignment and improves grounding, enabling a 7B-parameter model to write like a professional meteorologist.

By Manmeet Singh, Somnath Luitel, Prabhjot Singh, Manraaj Banga, Naveen Sudharsan, Josh Durkee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Advancing Subseasonal Forecasting with Machine Learning

The paper introduces Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC), a machine learning framework that learns to correct historical probabilistic forecasts, thereby reducing systematic errors in subseasonal weather predictions. Applied to leading dynamical and AI models from ECMWF, PBC doubles the AI system’s modest subseasonal skill and improves the operationally-debiased dynamical model for most pressure, temperature, and precipitation targets. In ECMWF’s 2025 real‑time forecasting competition, PBC’s global forecasts ranked first across all weather variables and lead times, outperforming multiple operational and ensemble models.

By Hannah Guan, Soukayna Mouatadid, Paulo Orenstein, Judah Cohen, Haiyu Dong, Zekun Ni, Jeremy Berman, Genevieve Flaspohler, Alex Lu, Jakob Schloer, Joshua Talib, Jonathan A. Weyn, Lester Mackey
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Can AI Weather Models Predict Beyond Two Weeks? A Quantitative Benchmark and Analysis of Long Rollouts

arXiv:2605. 30184v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While AI weather models excel at short-to-medium range forecasts (up to 15 days), they frequently suffer from ill-defined "instabilities" when rolled out over longer horizons.

By Fanny Lehmann, Firat Ozdemir, Yun Cheng, Torsten Hoefler, Sebastian Schemm, Benedikt Soja, Siddhartha Mishra
arXiv AI
Jun 3

AdaWeather: Adaptively Mixing Probabilistic Weather Forecasts with Logarithmic Regret

arXiv:2606. 02663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning have produced probabilistic weather forecasting models comparable to state-of-the-art numerical weather predictors.

By Saptarishi Dhanuka (Ashoka University), Sarvesh Iyer (Ashoka University), Manmeet Singh (Western Kentucky University), Mihir More (Ashoka University), Rushil Gupta (Ashoka University), Dhruman Gupta (Ashoka University), Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay (Ashoka University), Sandeep Juneja (Ashoka University)