Bright key facts / Deployed
A world-class forecast now fits on one machine.
Weather forecasting has spent fifty years as one of the largest users of supercomputing. AI models trained on the archive now produce comparable global forecasts in minutes, and the weights are published. The measurements they depend on are the part that has not become cheap.
- AI’s role
- NVIDIA's January 2026 Earth-2 release published open weights spanning the chain: HealDA turns observations into an initial atmosphere, Atlas forecasts to 15 days, StormScope predicts local weather zero to six hours ahead. ECMWF's AIFS has been operational since 25 February 2025 and NOAA's AIGFS since 17 December 2025.
- Documented result
- NOAA reports that a single 16-day AIGFS forecast uses 0.3% of the computing resources of the operational GFS and finishes in about 40 minutes. ECMWF reports gains of up to 20% on tropical cyclone tracks from AIFS at a 28 km grid against 9 km for its physics model.
- Important limitation
- Open weights are not the same as an operational service, and NVIDIA's own assimilation paper reports analyses about twice as far from the truth as ERA5.