But the AI model helped forecasters give an earlier warning to communities in its path, so they could better prepare. In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show that the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. “We don’t have that much cyclone data, but we have a lot of weather data,” says Ferran Alet, a research scientist at Google DeepMind and one of the paper’s lead authors. While earlier AI models have done well at predicting a storm’s track, “intensity they could not do well at all.”