Can AI help us better predict the weather?

**Hannah Fry** (0:00)
Welcome to Google DeepMind, the podcast. I'm Hannah Fry. When a hurricane is heading towards land, time becomes absolutely critical. An extra day of warning can clear the roads, empty the hospitals, open up shelters and get people to safety. Even a few hours can be the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe.
But while we can calculate the exact second the sun will rise a thousand years from now, predicting the weather in the future with certainty remains one of the trickiest physics problems on the planet. How do you handle something that is so sensitive to tiny fluctuations, where a small change in today's air pressure can turn into a major storm a week later? The famous butterfly effect. Well, the traditional way is solving fluid dynamics equations with supercomputers. But now there is another way that is doing something completely different. The team at Google DeepMind have been thinking about the challenge of AI weather prediction for years. They started back in 2020 with models that use satellite images to predict short-term rainfall. Today, the latest system, WeatherNext, provides detailed hour-by-hour predictions for the entire planet. Joining me to discuss how AI models the weather is Peter Battaglia, Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind.
Welcome to the podcast, Peter.

**Peter Battaglia** (1:24)
Thank you.

**Hannah Fry** (1:25)
I want to start with a really concrete example of how AI has made a difference. Tell me the story about Hurricane Melissa.

**Peter Battaglia** (1:31)
Yeah, so Hurricane Melissa was a very powerful hurricane that struck Jamaica and several Caribbean islands in October 2025
And we had been working on specific models for hurricane forecasting for several years. And earlier in 2025, about a year ago, we released our best weather model, and we created a website called Weather Lab that had live hurricane forecasts. We had also established these partnerships with a number of agencies, including the National Hurricane Center, which is in the US under NOAA. So throughout the season, we had been seeing that the model was fairly accurate at predicting hurricanes. And what became Hurricane Melissa started to form in the Atlantic about a week before it eventually made landfall, our forecast started showing that it was going to become a very intense hurricane.

**Hannah Fry** (2:30)
Because unusually, it started really small, didn't it? It stayed small for a while.

**Peter Battaglia** (2:34)
Yeah, and this is how they work. They start as a disturbance. It's just some pattern that could eventually, given the warm sea temperature, draw up enough energy to then become a very intense and ferocious storm. So about a week before, a little less than a week before, we started to see the model becoming quite confident that it was going to turn into a category five hurricane, which is the strongest category of hurricane.

**Hannah Fry** (3:01)
And what was it at this point?

**Peter Battaglia** (3:02)
I don't think it was even a tropical storm yet. It might have been a tropical depression at that point. So actually, we watched the folks on Twitter or X.
There's actually a pretty active meteorological community, and they follow a lot of the models. So they started to notice and say, this is the Google model is forecasting a very intense storm. And they're saying it's going to be category five, and people started to notice, and we were really watching intently.

**Hannah Fry** (3:26)
Well, the other models, I mean, because there's numerous other simulations that are running, looking exactly at that area at the same time, were they also predicting at this point that it was going to be category five?

**Peter Battaglia** (3:35)
Some were predicting that it was going to rise in intensity, but none, to my knowledge, had the confidence, and the confidence around that it was going to become that intense, and the specific trajectory, and the specific level of intensity. The National Hurricane Center, their forecasters are making, they're constantly observing and making guesses and determinations and trying to refine their own official projection about what's going to happen. They're drawing on all sorts of different information, like traditional models that are well understood, newer models, and they're designed as a center, they're sort of set up to take lots of different pieces of information and then sort of stitch that all together to form their forecast. And so on Saturday, they made an official determination that it would become a Category 5 storm and hit Jamaica.
It still wasn't even, I don't think it was even a Category 1 storm yet. So they had predicted that it was going to undergo a rapid intensification in like a 2-day, 2.5-day period.

**Hannah Fry** (4:35)
So this is Saturday and it was predicted to hit land on what day?