Aurora 1.5: Extending open foundation models for weather and Earth-system applications
Microsoft Kenji Takeda, Haiyu Dong, Jonathan Weyn, Amit Misra, Matt Corey, Kevin White, Shannon Monroe, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Ashley Llorens, Bonnie Kruft
Microsoft just released Aurora 1.5, a big upgrade to its open weather AI model, adding 22 new variables and hourly, probabilistic forecasts. It beats Europe's top forecasting system on 88.9% of tested metrics, and it's free to use.
Based on reporting by Microsoft, Kenji Takeda, Haiyu Dong, Jonathan Weyn, Amit Misra, Matt Corey, Kevin White, Shannon Monroe, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Ashley Llorens, Bonnie Kruft — read the original for the full story.
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Microsoft has pushed out a serious upgrade to Aurora, its open-source weather and Earth-system model, and the numbers are hard to ignore. The original model, born out of Microsoft Research AI for Science and published in Nature earlier this year, tracked four core variables. Aurora 1.5 adds 22 more, covering everything from solar radiation and cloud cover to humidity and wind fields, and it now forecasts hourly instead of at coarser intervals. That's the kind of resolution bump that matters if you're trying to time the start of rainfall or plan a power grid around solar output rather than just knowing it'll be
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
cloudy sometime Tuesday.
Read more about this at: Microsoft
