NOAA EAGLE: Experimental AI Global Weather Forecasts at 0.25° Resolution

NOAA's EAGLE forecasts are experimental AI-driven global weather predictions produced 4 times daily. The system is built upon Google DeepMind's GraphCast model, generating 6-hourly forecasts up to 16 days for major atmospheric and surface fields on a 0.25-degree latitude-longitude grid. These forecasts, hosted in GRIB2 format, served as the operational precursor to NOAA's AIGFS and AIGEFS models implemented in December 2025.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking AI-based weather models against traditional numerical weather prediction based on atmospheric fields like temperature and wind.
• Analyzing forecast skill and uncertainty using the ensemble forecast outputs mentioned in the description.
• Developing sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction applications based on the 16-day forecast horizon.
• Studying the impact of model fine-tuning with analysis data, as described for GraphCastGFS version 2.0.

Strengths

• Forecasts are generated 4 times daily (00Z, 06Z, 12Z, 18Z cycles), providing frequent updates.
• Data is provided on a high-resolution 0.25-degree latitude-longitude grid (approximately 28 km).
• Includes major atmospheric fields such as temperature, wind components, geopotential height, specific humidity, and vertical velocity.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics and data structure must be inferred after download from the GRIB2 files.
• The specific temporal coverage for the hosted EAGLE data is not explicitly stated, requiring manual inspection.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.

Provenance

Source

NOAA/NWS National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).

Collection Method

Generated by the GraphCastGFS system, an experimental setup using Google DeepMind's pre-trained GraphCast model.

Time Range

EAGLE SOLO version 1.0 forecasts ran from 06Z April 24, 2024 to 18Z December 18, 2025. EAGLE ensemble version 1.0 ran from 00Z April 29, 2025 to 18Z December 17, 2025.

Freshness

Update frequency is 4 times daily, but the last update date for the hosted bucket is unknown.

Geography

Global coverage.