Traditional weather forecasts run huge physics simulations on supercomputers. In recent years AI models have learned patterns from decades of past weather data and can now produce forecasts that are competitive on many measures, and far faster to compute once trained. Through 2026 weather agencies have continued testing these models alongside their established systems.
Speed is the headline benefit, because a forecast that takes seconds rather than hours can be rerun often as new observations arrive. Forecasters are careful to treat AI predictions as a complement rather than a replacement, since the physics based systems remain important for understanding rare and extreme events the models may have seen rarely in past data.