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The Day After Tomorrow

Weather prediction agencies across the world are embracing A.I. models to assist with forecasting, but there are plenty of reasons to believe old-school, physics-based models aren’t going anywhere. Instead, the real revolution will involve the encroachment of the private sector on the industry.

Hurricane Helene florida damage
Despite how far numerical weather prediction (N.W.P.) has come, the process tends to be slow, enormously costly, and remarkably energy-intensive. Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
August 26, 2025

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If you spent the past week watching Hurricane Erin whipping up huge waves along the East Coast before mercifully heading out to sea, you probably noticed how frequently forecasters mentioned the various models used to predict the storm’s path. Historically, this has been the domain of the National Hurricane Center (N.H.C.)—a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has been targeted by DOGE and the Trump administration for potentially crippling budget cuts. (Fortunately, Congress has since pushed back.) The N.H.C. uses dozens of models to track storms and alert the public to danger. These dynamic models, which are fed on a vast buffet of data gathered from satellites, weather balloons, buoys, radar, airplane and ship sensors, etcetera, and are powered by banks of supercomputers, have long been the indispensable tool at the heart of weather forecasting.