Windborne Systems Launches WeatherMesh 6 AI Weather Model

Windborne Systems released WeatherMesh 6 today, a new version of its AI weather forecasting model that the company says surpasses both traditional and AI forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting on several variables. The model produces a forecast every hour at 3 km resolution across Europe and the continental United States.

Kai Marshland, Windborne’s chief product officer, said WeatherMesh 6 “is as accurate five days out as a traditional forecast is the day before,” particularly on surface temperature measurements.

Traditional models generate forecasts every six hours using physics-based simulations that run on expensive supercomputers. The company operates about 400 balloons launched from 15 sites worldwide that collect sensor readings fed directly into the model. Joan Creus-Costa, Windborne’s head of AI, said the direct ingestion of balloon data is the main reason for the accuracy gains in WeatherMesh 6.

John Dean, Windborne’s CEO, noted that the company spent a year tuning and re-architecting its transformer-based model to maintain stability while incorporating the new data streams. “When we started doing data assimilation we were still very heavily reliant on ECMWF,” Dean said. ” Dean also questioned the viability of AI weather companies that lack proprietary data advantages.

“I don’t understand, personally, the business model of being an AI based weather company without a data set advantage,” he told TechCrunch. Windborne was founded in 2019 by Stanford students who initially focused on selling weather data collected by balloons.

After deep-learning weather models emerged in 2022, the company began building its own forecasting system alongside its data collection operations.

Last year a United Airlines jetliner struck one of the company’s balloons, causing minor damage to the aircraft but no injuries. Windborne has since added transponders that broadcast balloon locations through the ADS-B aviation surveillance system. The company has raised $25 million in venture funding and carried a reported valuation of $85 million in 2024.

U.S. Air Force and Navy. Windborne also sells its forecasts to investors and commodity traders. Dean said the company is prioritizing continued model and data infrastructure development over building large SaaS products.

” he said.