Google’s new hurricane model was breathtakingly good this season

The Atlantic hurricane season is drawing to a close, and with the tropics quieting down for a winter slumber, the focus of forecasters turns to evaluating what worked and what did not during the preceding season.

This year, the answers are clear. Although Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab only started releasing cyclone track forecasts in June, the company’s AI forecasting service performed exceptionally well. By contrast, the Global Forecast System model, which is operated by the US National Weather Service, is based on traditional physics, and runs on powerful supercomputers, performed abysmally.