What changed
Ai2 announced a new climate modeling initiative, backed by multimillion-dollar, three-year funding from Google.org and technical support from Google Research. The initiative will expand the Climate Modeling team to develop NeuralGCM+, an open-source model designed to improve the speed and reliability of long-term climate projections.
What this means in practice
The project builds on Google Research’s NeuralGCM, which uses physical equations to simulate large-scale dynamics and AI to represent smaller-scale processes like cloud formation and rainfall. Ai2’s focus will be on climate trends over years to decades, including how rainfall and water availability could change in regions like the southwestern United States. The initiative aims to make these tools more accessible to scientists and help communities make better-informed decisions about climate adaptation and water planning.
Limitations and availability
The supplied announcement does not specify the exact release date or availability of NeuralGCM+. The project will develop the model along three fronts: connecting the atmosphere and ocean, improving the model’s response to a warming world, and making the tools easier to use and extend. The existing NeuralGCM code and documentation are already available, and the team plans to release models and frameworks with documented workflows for external researchers to train and adapt models. The initiative will also improve performance on widely used GPUs.
