Microsoft's Aurora: AI Weather Forecasting Model Outperforms Traditional Methods
2025-05-24
Microsoft has unveiled Aurora, a new AI weather forecasting model trained on massive datasets from satellites, radar, and weather stations. Outperforming traditional methods in speed and accuracy, Aurora successfully predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall and the 2022 Iraq sandstorm, even beating the National Hurricane Center in predicting 2022-2023 tropical cyclone tracks. While training requires significant computing power, Aurora's runtime efficiency is remarkably high, generating forecasts within seconds. A simplified version powers hourly forecasts in Microsoft's MSN Weather app, and the source code and model weights are publicly available.