DeepMind open-sources WeatherNext 2 and WeatherNext Cyclones with a Nature paper showing ~1 extra day of hurricane warning
On 6 Aug 2026 Google DeepMind released weights and code for WeatherNext Cyclones, WeatherNext 2 and WeatherNext 2-mini under commercial-use-friendly licences, alongside a Nature paper showing its cyclone model gives more than a day of extra lead time on track, intensity and size forecasts.
Key facts
- Three-day WeatherNext Cyclones forecast about as accurate as prior systems at two days: '>24 hours lead time advantage'
- Released: WeatherNext Cyclones, WeatherNext 2, WeatherNext 2-mini (runs on a single TPU / free Colab)
- Licences: Apache 2.0 for code/notebooks, CC BY 4.0 for other materials — first DeepMind weather weights allowing commercial use
- Paper in Nature (s41586-026-10953-2)
- Partners: US National Hurricane Center, CIRA, UK Met Office; helped NHC forecast Hurricane Melissa's 2025 rapid intensification
Science result
- Field
- climate-weather / tropical cyclone forecasting
- Problem
- Forecasting tropical-cyclone track, intensity and size
- Result
- WeatherNext Cyclones' 3-day forecasts are about as accurate as prior systems' 2-day forecasts (>24 h extra lead time); weights released for commercial use.
- AI system
- WeatherNext Cyclones, WeatherNext 2
- Human role
- Human-designed models; used operationally by forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed in Nature (2026); operational evaluation with NHC
- Status
- confirmed
What happened
DeepMind published open weights and code for its WeatherNext family and a peer-reviewed Nature paper on WeatherNext Cyclones, co-developed with Google Research and operational forecasters.
Why it matters
An extra day of hurricane warning is roughly a decade of conventional meteorological progress; releasing the weights for commercial use lets national weather services and companies run state-of-the-art AI forecasting themselves.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
- 2026-09-29: added science block (science & math tab)
Related events
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- AI weather forecasting goes operational: ECMWF's AIFS (Feb 2025), then NOAA's AI models (Dec 2025) ★★★★
Sources (4)
- officialDeepMind: AI model achieves breakthrough in forecasting cyclones
- codeGitHub: google-deepmind/weathernext
- officialGoogle blog: WeatherNext 2 cyclones
- pressOpen Source For You: DeepMind open sources WeatherNext
id: 2026-08-06-weathernext-open-source · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline