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3 Sep 2026

DeepMind’s WeatherNext 3 adds hourly satellite-fed forecasts

3 Sep 2026: Google DeepMind and Google Research published WeatherNext 3, a global weather model they say ingests live geostationary satellite mosaics and refreshes hourly. Surface variables go to about 5 km — roughly five times sharper, they write, than WeatherNext 2’s 25 km / six-hour grid.

3 Sep 2026: DeepMind posted “Introducing WeatherNext 3.” The model, built with Google Research, takes live geostationary satellite mosaics as a direct input and issues a new forecast every hour.

DeepMind: key surface fields such as temperature and moisture are shown at about 5 km, other surface fields at 10 km, and atmospheric fields at 25 km. It calls that roughly five times sharper than WeatherNext 2, which ran on a 25 km grid in six-hour steps.

The lab cites independent live evaluations by Brightband’s Operational WeatherBench. It also says longer-range precipitation in Search, Gemini, Maps, the Maps Platform Weather API, and Earth Engine is up to about 50% more accurate. Those figures are DeepMind’s. This desk did not rerun them.

Hourly data is offered through BigQuery, Earth Engine, and Cloud Storage downloads. The post says the model is already wired into Search, Gemini, Maps, Maps Platform, and Cloud.

DeepMind’s own disclaimer: official forecasts and severe-weather warnings still belong to national weather services. The weights are not described as public.

A weather model inside Search and Maps is an infrastructure change. The 5 km grid, the 50% precip line, and the Brightband citation stay DeepMind’s until someone else measures them.

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