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  • Hacker News
  • Sweet. This will be a great layer for our hazard prediction engine.
  • In the energy world, this should be such a boon over the classic NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction; complex ML models), but I've not seen it implementated. Anyone with experience of these models over classic NWP?
  • A few weather forecast sites in Europe have them on their websites. It's just another forecast you can select and compare in an ensemble.

    Problem is that the WN3 grid is still quite rough (5km) - but a that's a brutal improvement for many places compared to many other global models.

    Quite a few country-scale models go down to a 1-2km grid nowadays. This is very helpful in complex geography like mountains and alleys.

  • Why should they be such a boon? High-resolution, regional NWP with fast refresh has been a standard tool for over a decade.
  • "Weather Lab is not available in your country or region at this time." cool...
  • Nice, coming from a company mainly impacted by the country currently considered the least trustworthy on climate change
  • Is there a convenient way to use this on iOS? AFAIK Google Search and Maps only show rather basic information.
  • Last time they have only shipped the model on web in mobile...
  • Mobile app would be awesome.
  • I searched a bit and seems like the answer is no besides this web app https://deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab

    > WeatherNext 3 will power weather features in Google Search, the Gemini app and Google Maps, as well as the Google Maps Weather API and Google Earth Engine.

    https://dataconomy.com/2026/09/04/weathernext-3-ai-forecasts...

    So I assume the main way would be googling "weather Los Angeles" and it will be powered by the WeatherNext 3 models

    They also open sourced the last one and are doing B2B/enterprise arrangements so maybe other weather apps are experimenting with it.

    by dmix
  • Reading through the paper and...

    This seems to be a bit of "we're throwing a _bunch_ of inputs into this machine learning set and then pulling out outputs". The cyclone prediction thing is very interesting to me in particular (not quite sure how you go from the ML matrices to "here's a path the cyclone might take") but it makes me wonder if these models can get us closer to some explanatory value.

    I imagine a lot of predictive sciences are ultimately about mixing together a bunch of inputs to attempt to decipher some output. Do we end up being able to take stuff from here and figure out some new ideas about modelling the climate as a whole?

    by rtpg
  • The exploration page is really easy to use. Having more reliable weather predictions is a genuinely useful product.
  • I disagree.. Feels very sloppy to me:

    - Time is UTC rather than local by default.

    - Units are imperial rather than metric (i.e. not basing it on users locale)

    - The concept of init time is not initially clear at all, so it's confusing when you click the calendar icon to see the weather forecast for a future date only to see it isn't an option, you have to use the slider.

    - When changing the sidebar to the "detailed" view, most of the hovering element is cut off by the container so you can't actually read it.

    And it took longer to write this comment than it did to find these issues. It's fine since it's clearly marked as experimental, but I disagree that it's "really easy to use" :p

  • There is a great article from the German Meteorological Service on WeatherNext 3 and how AI-based weather models will probably co-exist with physics-based ones.

    https://www.dwd.de/DE/wetter/thema_des_tages/2026/9/6.html (German only)

  • They even have an interactive world map with all the layers. It's so cool when an announcement comes with the actual goods.
  • I'm not seeing that kind of demo. I just see a video, a bunch of future-tense words about what could be done by someone, and the requisite hype.

    Link?

    edit: The link for the demo is as thus, https://deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab

  • It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again. What kind of magic were they doing?
  • Dark sky was awful and all of its acclaim comes from confirmation bias. In seattle I'd see its forecast change by the minute. The whole point of a forecast is to know what will happen and if that keeps changing, then we do not know.
  • The only forecasted rainfall for local areas within a very short timeframe. This made it possible to utilize simple factors to predict the near future.

    It is built into Apple Weather after Apple purchased them.

  • Dark Sky is still one of my all time favorite app. The accuracy of the forecast within the coming hour is to this day unmatched. It constantly reminded me of Back to the Future 2, where Doc says the rain will stop in “in exactly 5 seconds”
  • There's reduced data available for initial conditions, so I wonder how that will effect things:

    * https://apnews.com/article/weather-forecasts-worsen-doge-tru...

    * https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

    A good book on the history of forecasting, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast:

    * https://www.andrewblum.net/the-weather-machine-2

  • Don't plenty of android devices have barometers? I expect Google being Google and recording all that data unless you opt out.

    Would that be practical for weather forecasting or not really?

    by yreg
  • It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.
  • I see the same sentiment any time any weather app is posted. Especially when Dark Sky comes up
  • At one point they did release the most accurate weather model by far, but it actually decreased usage compared to showing a weather forecast more skewed towards "happy" temperatures and weather. I'm certain this is still the case and likely explains why you are seeing a more positive (no rain) version of the weather.
  • Same experience.

    As a former Googler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is an integration that is "planned" -- but just not done yet.

    And some good handful of people are planning to wring a promo out of work. "Implemented weather UI in Android that is 63% more accurate." ;)

  • does google actually use their own models in consumer products? i'm not an android user, but the weather widget in the google search results for my area always seems to be attributed to weather.com.
  • The Google daily and hourly forecasts aren't great, but the weather map forecast is excellent. Where does that come from? What's generating the predicted movement of the storm clouds?
  • Weather 2 doesn't seem to have been an ensemble model. Weather 3 is, so theoretically it can get more accurate outcomes by taking the probabilistic analysis of several models concurrently to determine the most likely weather conditions.

    I'm building a tool right now that uses an ensemble to determine wind gust likelihood, which is useful for safety critical work on construction sites and the like.