As Category 4 Hurricane Simon skirts Mexico, forecasters weigh Google DeepMind's AI model alongside physics-based guidance

Hurricane Simon was a Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph on Sunday afternoon, centered about 105 miles west-northwest of Manzanillo, Mexico, and moving north-northwest at 6 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center's 3 p.m. CST advisory. A hurricane warning was in effect from Punta San Telmo to El Roblito and for Las Islas Marías, and Mexico issued a new hurricane watch farther up the coast (NHC advisory).

Simon is the only active tropical cyclone in the basins the NHC and the Central Pacific Hurricane Center cover. Both centers' outlooks said there were no tropical cyclones in the Atlantic or Central North Pacific at the time (NHC; CPHC).

AI guidance in the forecast

In its forecast discussion, the NHC said some outlier models, such as the American GFS, turn Simon southwestward after 48 hours, but that "the majority of the ensemble guidance (European-EPS, Google DeepMind) do show this slow recurving solution back into Mexico." The center forecast Simon to move inland and dissipate in the day 3–4 period and called the forecast "low confidence" (NHC discussion).

Google DeepMind began publishing live cyclone forecasts on its Weather Lab site in June 2025 and partnered with the NHC to support its forecasts. The company said internal testing on 2023 and 2024 storms showed its model's 5-day track predictions were on average 140 km closer to the true position than ECMWF's physics-based ensemble (Google DeepMind).

How it performed last year

The NHC's verification report for the 2025 Atlantic season said official forecasts generally outperformed most models, but that the Google DeepMind ensemble mean, labeled GDMI, "slightly outperformed NHC at the shorter lead times from 12 to 72 h." The report noted GDMI was not available for the first two storms of the season. It also said intensity forecasts were harder in 2025, with errors above the five-year average during many rapid-intensification events (NHC 2025 Verification Report).

An earlier NHC preview said 2025 was the first season the center used AI-based models in real-time operations and called the DeepMind model "very useful," while cautioning that some AI systems "were not consistently available on a timely basis" (NHC preview).

Europe's AI models

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts runs its own AI system, the AIFS. Its deterministic version has been operational since February 25, 2025, and its ensemble since July 1, 2025. Both were upgraded to version 2 on May 12, 2026, when the ensemble began producing tropical cyclone tracks out to 15 days from 52 members (ECMWF).

ECMWF has also described a prototype, built with the University of Cambridge, that uses a second machine-learning system to correct AIFS's storm intensity errors. ECMWF says the next steps are to run it in real time and evaluate it with forecasters (ECMWF blog).