Google releases WeatherNext cyclone models: now open source

Google has open-sourced WeatherNext 2 and WeatherNext Cyclones, putting its faster tropical cyclone forecasting tools in more researchers’ hands. The company says the models can give forecasters about an extra day of warning, produce a 15-day forecast in under a minute on a single TPU, and avoid the hours of supercomputer time those runs usually require. There’s also WeatherNext 2-mini, a lighter version that can run on a regular computer.

Google says WeatherNext 2 handles both storm track and intensity in a single model. It was trained on nearly 20 terabytes of atmospheric data, along with records from almost 5,000 storms, and it has already helped support the National Hurricane Center’s forecast for Hurricane Melissa in 2025.

If you work in forecasting or research, this release is probably one to download. Wider access should lead to more outside testing and validation. Still, Google WeatherNext 2, WeatherNext Cyclones, and WeatherNext 2-mini make the most sense as companions to conventional physics-based models, not replacements. Extreme-event intensity , storm structure, and unusual edge cases are still hard to capture reliably.

The open-source code and model weights are available now from Google.