Free guide · Oct 15, 2026
WeatherNext 3: find the right layer and compare forecasts fairly
How to find the weather layer you need, check its grid size, and compare two forecasts for the same place and time.
The short version
WeatherNext 3 is the weather AI from Google DeepMind and Google Research. It reads live satellite pictures and starts a new global forecast every hour, out to 15 days, with 64 ensemble members. The sharpest grid, 5 km, is only for 2 m temperature and dew point. Other surface layers, including rain, are about 10 km, and upper-air layers are 25 km. You can look at it in Weather Lab, and you can request free access to the raw data in BigQuery, Earth Engine or Cloud Storage. It is an experimental research forecast, so for warnings I still use the national weather service. I have not tested its accuracy where I live; the facts here come from Google's own pages.
What's in the full guide
- 01Which layer has which grid
- 02Step 1: Look at it in Weather Lab
- 03Step 2: Find the weather layer you need
- 04Step 3: Get the data
- 05Step 4: See how big its grid is
- 06Step 5: Check two forecasts for the same place and time
- 07What Google says, and what it doesn't
- 08Sources