How Huawei’s Pangu AI Model Revolutionizes 7‑Day Global Weather Forecasts

On February 29, the National Natural Science Foundation of China released the 2023 Top Ten Scientific Advances, highlighting Huawei Cloud’s Pangu weather large model.

Weather forecasting is a frontier scientific problem with great societal value. Traditional numerical weather prediction, dating back to the 1950s, relies on massive super‑computing to solve atmospheric partial differential equations, but its progress faces increasing challenges.

Huawei Cloud’s R&D team applied artificial‑intelligence techniques to create a three‑dimensional neural network aligned with Earth coordinate systems. The network efficiently handles complex weather processes, and a hierarchical temporal‑aggregation strategy reduces iteration error, enabling accurate medium‑range forecasts. Trained on global reanalysis data from 1979‑2017, the model forms the Pangu weather large model.

The model can forecast surface and 13 upper‑air layers for temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and other elements up to seven days ahead. Compared with the European Centre for Medium‑Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) system, it improves forecast lead time by about 0.6 day and cuts tropical‑cyclone track error by 25 %. Its inference speed is roughly ten thousand times faster than traditional numerical methods, delivering global seven‑day forecasts in about ten seconds.

Currently, Pangu provides second‑level global forecasts covering typhoon tracks, precipitation, geopotential, humidity, wind, temperature and sea‑level pressure, and is used in various research scenarios. It has been validated by ECMWF, the China Meteorological Administration, Hong Kong Observatory and others, successfully predicting major 2023 typhoons such as Mawar, Talim, Doksuri and Surigae.

On July 5, 2023, Nature published a paper on Huawei Cloud’s Pangu weather research, praising its potential to reshape the future of meteorology. The model is now operational at the ECMWF and Hong Kong Observatory, and Huawei Cloud is collaborating with the Shenzhen Meteorological Bureau, Thailand’s National Meteorological Agency and others to build high‑precision regional forecasting models, enhancing disaster‑warning capabilities.