News

#get involved

1 min read • Oct 06, 2026

Submitting a paper using the Weather Generator?

Are you planning to submit a paper that uses the Weather Generator Tool?

1 min read • Sep 28, 2026

Changing the Forecast: DIVERSITY, NETWORKING & ALLYSHIP IN RESEARCH

Join us for inspiring talks, engaging discussions, and meaningful networking on gender and diversity in research

#service call

5 min read • Sep 16, 2026

WeatherGenerator Service Call 2026

The WeatherGenerator Service Call 2026 invites European research groups and industry partners outside the WeatherGenerator consortium to propose applications or integrations of the WeatherGenerator. Selected projects will receive up to 3 person-months of expert engineering support and will run through 2027. Deadline: 16 October 2026, 14:00 CET.

#hackathon

5 min read • Sep 01, 2026

Registration now open for the WeatherGenerator Community Hackathon

The WeatherGenerator Community Hackathon 📍 Location: Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany 📅 Date: 26–28 January 2027 📝 Registration: 1 September – 1 November 2026, via REGISTRATION Join our first Community Hackathon and become part of the WeatherGenerator community! The WeatherGenerator project will host its first Community hackathon on 26–28 January 2027 in Jena, Germany. This in-person, hands-on event will bring together researchers and professionals working across Earth System sciences to explore the WeatherGenerator, exchange ideas and become part of its growing community. The goal is that each participating team can run and fine-tune the WeatherGenerator for its own application while learning from and contributing to the community around the open-source model. The WeatherGenerator is an open-source European foundation model of the Earth system aiming to provide new machine-learned Digital Twin for Destination Earth. It is developed by 16 partners in a Horizon Europe project coordinated by ECMWF. The WeatherGenerator learns an unified latent representation from a wide variety of Earth system datasets - reanalyses, model output, satellite products and in-situ observations - using a self-supervised, masked-token approach. Rather than training a separate model for their task, users can use this general WeatherGenerator foundation model and fine-tune it towards the outputs that matter for their application.

#Science Explainer

1 min read • Jun 11, 2026

Science Explainer #2: What is representation learning?

What is representation learning and how does it support smarter weather forecasting? Sophie Xhonneux from ECMWF explores exactly that in the second WeatherGenerator Science Explainer. The atmosphere is measured continuously by satellites, weather stations, and balloons, producing vast, overlapping datasets. Rather than training separate models on all of this data, WeatherGenerator learns a compressed, unified representation that captures the underlying physics of the atmosphere, enabling more efficient and powerful forecasting across applications.

1 min read • Apr 14, 2026

Looking for Mentors!

Whether you are early in your career or an experienced researcher, meaningful connections can shape the path ahead. The WeatherGenerator Mentorship Program brings together professionals and researchers across career stages in an informal setting built for honest exchange and growth. The WeatherGenerator Mentorship Program is a 6-month initiative connecting experienced professionals and researchers with early career peers. Mentors share their experiences and perspectives, contributing to a diverse community, while mentees gain space to reflect on their goals, explore career topics, and grow their network.

#Science Explainer

1 min read • Apr 07, 2026

Science Explainer #1: Can weather models predict power prices?

In the first instalment of the WeatherGenerator Science Explainer series, Even Nordhagen from Norwegian Meteorological Institute explains how the WeatherGenerator goes beyond traditional weather models, directly predicting energy - relevant variables like wind power output and reservoir inflow, without the need for separate downstream models. With a built-in long-term memory, the system can track slow-building processes like snowpack and soil moisture, and ultimately learn the full chain from atmospheric conditions to electricity markets.

1 min read • Mar 26, 2026

Video Highlights from Oslo

From 10–12 February 2026 WeatherGenerator project partners and participants met at Forskningsparken – Oslo Science Park, as well as online, for a dynamic programme combining an internal General Assembly, a public Dissemination & Stakeholder Day, and a hands-on Coding Workshop. The programme covered the technical foundations of WeatherGenerator: its architecture, training approach, data formats and applications - alongside contributions from our sister projects TerraDT and UrbanAIR and invited speakers working on AI-driven approaches to weather and climate science, including foundation modelling.

5 min read • Mar 05, 2026

Women in WeatherGenerator: Celebrating International Women's Day

Science advances through the courage to ask bold questions and across the WeatherGenerator project, women are at the forefront of asking them. From developing the core AI architecture to adapting it for real-world applications in energy, health, and extreme weather forecasting, female researchers and engineers are shaping the future of AI-driven meteorology every day. WeatherGenerator is an EU Horizon project bringing together 16 leading European organisations to build a next-generation foundation model for weather and climate. Behind this mission is a diverse community of scientists, and on this International Women’s Day, we want to shine a light on some of the extraordinary women who make this project what it is. Coming from across the globe, bringing expertise in atmospheric chemistry, machine learning, probabilistic modelling, remote sensing, and operational meteorology.

1 min read • Feb 17, 2026

WeatherGenerator Meets in Oslo and Online

One year into the project, partners came together for three days of exchange, discussion and hands-on collaboration in Oslo, Norway. It was great to meet in person, connect with new partners, and strengthen existing collaborations. From 10–12 February 2026, project partners and participants met at Forskningsparken - Oslo Science Park - and online for the WeatherGenerator event hosted by Norwegian Meteorological Institute | Meteorologisk institutt.

#workshop

1 min read • Jan 22, 2026

Advancing AI Climate Models - AlgoEarth & CESOC Workshop

We would like to invite you to the AlgoEarth and CESOC Workshop “Advancing AI Climate Models” Our goal is to connect expertise across algorithm design, machine learning, and Earth system science, fostering interdisciplinary thinking around next-generation AI methods designed for emerging global observation platforms and their use in weather and climate prediction. The event will take place from Wednesday, 04 March 2026 (12:00 CET), to Thursday, 05 March 2026 (13:00 CET) at the University of Cologne, Pohligstraße 3, 50969 Cologne, Germany, in lecture hall 4.001.

#article

4 min read • Jan 20, 2026

Forecast Verification for AI Models - Article by Britta Seegebrecht and Sabrina Wahl

Forecast Verification for AI models Can we trust AI models? This question could be from a sci-fi movie but nowadays it becomes more and more relevant since so called artificial intelligence (AI) based on machine learning (ML) has made its way into a vast range of application fields from marketing to costumer services, from medical assistance to quality control – and weather forecasting is no exception. For predictions of the weather conditions this question translates roughly to: ‘How accurate and reliable is the forecast, where and under which conditions/for which situations?’ These questions are targeted by the field of forecast verification.What is forecast verification and why is it important?

3 min read • Dec 22, 2025

WeatherGenerator Highlights 2025

2025 marked the first year for the WeatherGenerator project, with major advances across all areas - from model architecture to expanded datasets and growing community engagement. Let’s have a look at some of the project’s highlights of the year.

#Dissemination

1 min read • Dec 11, 2025

Dissemination Workshop

Join Us in Oslo – WeatherGenerator Dissemination Workshop 2026! We are excited to announce the upcoming WeatherGenerator Dissemination Workshop for everyone working with climate data, environmental modelling, and weather-related decision-making. 📍 Location: Hybrid - Online and in Oslo, Norway 📅 Date: 11 February 2026 The day event will open with a summary of the project, followed by detailed discussion with the project partners on the WeatherGenerator achievements. Invited guest speakers will highlight the relevance and usage of the WeatherGenerator and its tools / applications, and we will also have highlight presentation from related international efforts in the area of foundation modelling for weather and climate science.

2 min read • Dec 04, 2025

Explore the New WeatherGenerator Theme Videos

Explore the New WeatherGenerator Theme Videos We are excited to introduce a brand-new collection of videos that takes you behind the scenes of the WeatherGenerator project. Four Theme Videos – each dedicated to one core pillar of the initiative – along with an overall summary video are now available on our website. Each Theme Video highlights a key element of the project: Theme 1: From Raw Data to Ready-to-Use Inputs This video explores how the project brings together diverse climate and weather datasets, transforming them into a unified, scalable foundation tailored for machine-learning workflows.

1 min read • Oct 20, 2025

Video Highlights from Our First Hackathon

Video Highlights from Our First Hackathon We are pleased to share highlights from WeatherGenerator’s first internal hackathon, held from 27–29 August 2025 in Bonn, Germany at ECMWF. Over the course of three days, around 40 researchers, developers, and application partners from across Europe came together to collaborate, exchange knowledge, and lay the foundation for one of the EU’s most ambitious AI-for-climate projects.

3 min read • Oct 13, 2025

WeatherGenerator’s Sister Projects

WeatherGenerator’s Sister Projects WeatherGenerator is one of three projects launched in January and February 2025 under Horizon Europe to strengthen Destination Earth (DestinE), Europe’s initiative to build a high-precision, interactive digital twin of the Earth. Digital twins are computational models of real-world phenomena that can be used to simulate the past, model the present, and predict the future. Together with TerraDT and UrbanAIR, we expand the DestinE ecosystem by addressing different but complementary aspects of the Earth system.

3 min read • Oct 06, 2025

Supercomputers in the WeatherGenerator

What are Supercomputers? Supercomputers are high-performance computing systems designed to solve problems which exceed the capacity of conventional machines. Their defining feature is massive parallelism: instead of relying on a single processor, they connect tens of thousands of CPUs and GPUs which perform calculations simultaneously. This parallel architecture allows them to reach speeds measured in petaflops (10¹⁵ operations per second) or even exaflops (10¹⁸ operations per second), enabling computations that would take years on a standard computer to be completed within hours or days.

3 min read • Sep 03, 2025

How To Get Involved

Learn how to get involved in the WeatherGenerator Project.

3 min read • Jul 31, 2025

WeatherGenerator’s First Internal Hackathon

From 27–29 August 2025, project partners of the EU-funded WeatherGenerator project gathered for the first internal hackathon at ECMWF’s facility in Bonn, Germany. This event brought together around 40 researchers, developers, and application partners from across Europe to collaborate in person and lay the groundwork for one of the EU’s most ambitious AI-for-climate projects.

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