Benefit Ledger and Harm Ledger
Events
Frequency · stacked by domain
Events over time
- Climate & Environment
Heatmap
Domain by month
Significance
Impact tiers
Base impact
- T1 · 1Useful / Limited
- T2 · 3Notable / Significant
- T3 · 10Major
- T4 · 30Historic
- T5 · 100Civilizational / Catastrophic
Base points before attribution, evidence, realization, durability, and credit share.
MethodologyFrequency
Benefit versus harm counts
Google deploys WeatherNext 3 hourly satellite-driven forecasts in Search and Maps
On 3 September 2026 Google DeepMind and Google Research launched WeatherNext 3, an hourly satellite-driven global model at up to 5 km resolution, and began using it in Search, Gemini, Maps, Maps Platform, Earth Engine, and Cloud.
WeatherNext Cyclones adds a day of tropical-cyclone forecast lead time
On 6 August 2026 Nature published Google DeepMind’s WeatherNext Cyclones model, reporting about a day’s extra lead time on track, intensity, and wind structure versus leading operational models, with National Hurricane Center use during Hurricane Melissa.
Google deploys WeatherNext 2 forecasts in Search, Maps, and Earth Engine
On 17 November 2025 Google DeepMind and Google Research launched WeatherNext 2, an ensemble weather model they reported as faster and more accurate than the prior WeatherNext system, and began using it in Search, Gemini, Pixel Weather, Maps Platform, Earth Engine, and BigQuery.
AlphaEarth Foundations releases annual 10-meter satellite embeddings
On 30 July 2025 DeepMind introduced AlphaEarth Foundations, a model that embeds petabytes of Earth observation into a compact annual 10-meter representation released in Google Earth Engine and tested with more than 50 partner organizations.
Aurora foundation model beats several operational Earth-system forecasts in retrospective tests
Microsoft’s Aurora, published in Nature on 21 May 2025, was pretrained on more than one million hours of geophysical data and outperformed operational baselines on air quality, waves, cyclone tracks, and high-resolution weather in the paper’s tests.
ECMWF makes its AIFS machine-learning forecast operational
On 25 February 2025 ECMWF placed AIFS Single v1 into 24/7 operations alongside IFS, the first fully operational open ML weather model with a wide parameter set; AIFS ENS followed on 1 July 2025.
GenCast beats ECMWF ENS on most 15-day ensemble weather targets
DeepMind’s GenCast, published in Nature on 4 December 2024, generated 0.25° 15-day ensemble forecasts that outperformed ECMWF ENS on 97.2 percent of 1,320 evaluated targets.
NeuralGCM hybrid GCM matches weather skill and runs multi-decade climate simulations
Google Research and DeepMind’s NeuralGCM, published in Nature in July 2024, combined a differentiable dynamical core with learned physics and showed competitive medium-range skill plus multi-decade climate stability with prescribed SST.
Google Flood Hub issues 7-day river-flood forecasts in ungauged basins
A Nature paper on 20 March 2024 described Google’s operational AI hydrology system that provides free 7-day flood forecasts, including in ungauged watersheds, via Flood Hub covering dozens of countries.
GraphCast outperforms ECMWF HRES on most medium-range weather targets
DeepMind’s GraphCast, published in Science on 14 November 2023, produced 10-day 0.25° global forecasts in under a minute and beat HRES on about 90 percent of evaluated targets.
Google Project Green Light recommends traffic-signal changes in partner cities
Google Research’s Green Light, expanded publicly in 2023, uses Maps-derived models to suggest signal timing; Google reported up to 30 percent fewer stops and 10 percent lower intersection emissions in early tests covering tens of millions of monthly trips.
Pangu-Weather outperforms IFS on many medium-range scores at far lower cost
Huawei’s Pangu-Weather, published in Nature on 5 July 2023, reported 3D Earth-specific transformer forecasts that beat operational IFS on a majority of 3–7 day upper-air targets while running more than 10,000 times faster.