AI weather forecasting goes operational: ECMWF's AIFS (Feb 2025), then NOAA's AI models (Dec 2025)
On 25 Feb 2025 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts made its machine-learned AIFS Single model operational alongside its physics model. It was up to 20% better on tropical-cyclone tracks and used about 1,000× less energy per forecast. The AIFS ensemble followed on 1 Jul 2025. On 17 Dec 2025 NOAA deployed AIGFS (GraphCast-based), AIGEFS and the hybrid HGEFS operationally.
Key facts
- AIFS Single: operational 25 Feb 2025, ~28 km grid, ~1,000× less energy, up to 20% better cyclone tracks
- AIFS ENS operational 1 Jul 2025; both upgraded to v2 on 12 May 2026
- NOAA (17 Dec 2025): AIGFS uses 99.7% less compute; AIGEFS uses 9% of the physics ensemble's compute and gains 18–24 h of skill; HGEFS is billed as the first operational hybrid AI/physics ensemble
- ECMWF Director-General Florence Rabier: 'This milestone will transform weather science and predictions.'
Science result
- Field
- climate-weather / operational numerical weather prediction
- Problem
- Replacing or complementing physics-based operational forecasts
- Result
- Machine-learned models adopted as official operational forecasts by major national and international centres.
- AI system
- AIFS, AIGFS (GraphCast), AIGEFS, HGEFS
- Human role
- Human-built; used by operational forecasters
- Verification
- Operational verification by ECMWF and NOAA
- Status
- confirmed
What happened
Within about 15 months of GraphCast's publication, the world's leading forecast centres began issuing official forecasts from machine-learned models.
Why it matters
It is one of the fastest transitions of AI research into critical public infrastructure.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- GraphCast: ML weather model beats the world's best physics-based 10-day forecast on 90% of targets ★★★★
- Microsoft's Aurora foundation model beats operational forecasts for air quality, waves, cyclones and weather ★★★
- DeepMind open-sources WeatherNext 2 and WeatherNext Cyclones with a Nature paper showing ~1 extra day of hurricane warning ★★★
Sources (3)
- officialECMWF: AI forecasts become operational
- officialNOAA deploys new generation of AI-driven global weather models
- pressCACM: AI weather forecasting goes operational
id: 2025-02-25-ecmwf-aifs-operational-ai-weather · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline