Nvidia’s new AI weather models probably saw this storm coming weeks ago

Summary

In the run-up to the winter storm currently pummeling much of the U.S., weather forecasts for some regions were all over the map, with snowfall predictions varying wildly. Nvidia couldn’t have timed the release of its new Earth-2 weather forecasting models any better. Or, given how accurate the company claims the new models are, maybe it knew something we didn’t? The new AI models promise to make weather forecasting faster and more accurate. Nvidia claims that one model in particular, Earth-2 Medium Range, beats Google DeepMind’s AI weather model, GenCast, on more than 70 variables. GenCast, which Google released in December 2024, was itself significantly more accurate than existing weather models that were capable of generating forecasts up to 15 days out. Nvidia announced the new tools Monday at the American Meteorological Society meeting in Houston. “Philosophically, scientifically, it’s a return to simplicity,” Mike Pritchard, director of climate simulation at Nvidia, told reporters on a call before the meeting. “We’re moving away from hand-tailored niche AI architectures and leaning into the future of simple, scalable, transformer architectures.” Traditionally, most weather forecasts rely on simulations of physics as observed in the real world. AI models are a relatively recent addition. The Earth-2 Medium Range model is based on a new Nvidia architecture called Atlas, about which the company said it would release more details on Monday. Alongside Medium Range, Nvidia’s Earth-2 suite includes a Nowcasting model and Global Data Assimilation model. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 Nowcasting produces short-term predictions from zero to six hours into the future, and it’s aimed at helping meteorologists forecast the impacts of storms and other hazardous weather. “Because this model is trained directly on globally available geostationary satellite observations, rather than region-specific physics model outputs, Nowcasting’s approach can be adapt...