Weather by Neural Network: Yandex Is Redefining Meteorology for Millions

In a Matter of Minutes

The company has announced the rollout of its proprietary neural forecasting technology, NeuroMeteum, within the Yandex Weather service. The technology has the potential to fundamentally change how quickly and accurately meteorological data is delivered.

NeuroMeteum replaces the previous Meteum system, which relied on classical physical and mathematical models requiring massive supercomputer resources. The key advantage of the new approach is speed. Where global atmospheric models previously took hours to compute, the neural network now completes the same task in minutes. This makes it possible not only to update forecasts more frequently but also to recalculate them multiple times to improve accuracy.

From Research to a Mass Service

At the initial stage, NeuroMeteum is being used to forecast precipitation. In the near future, the neural network is expected to predict temperature, wind conditions, and generate detailed forecasts up to ten days ahead with high accuracy. Yandex has become the first mass-market service globally to deploy this kind of neural weather-forecasting model for a broad audience, moving the technology from academic research into everyday use for millions of people.

Yandex Weather is already one of the most widely used services in the country, and the transition to NeuroMeteum strengthens its position by offering users not just convenience but a technologically advanced product. Russian meteorological technologies are now approaching the level of leading global counterparts, such as Google WeatherNext2.

Accurate climate and weather forecasting is difficult to overstate in its importance. It is not only a matter of scientific interest but also a critically important factor for many sectors of the economy, including agroclimatology and agriculture

Denis Krivoguz

senior research fellow at the Department of Oceanology, Institute of Earth Sciences, Southern Federal University, PhD in Geography

AI at the Core

Over the past several years, Yandex has steadily embedded artificial intelligence models across its core products. These include AI-generated answers and reasoning in Search, the launch of NeuroExpert for document analysis, and the continued development of the Alice voice assistant and its deep integration across services. Even the previous generation of the Meteum weather system already relied on neural networks to “consult” and refine the outputs of classical physical models. Neurometeum represents a qualitatively new step forward, in which the neural network itself becomes the core of the forecasting system rather than an auxiliary layer.

The technology has the potential to function as a “digital meteorologist” for entire industries where forecast accuracy is critical, including agriculture, logistics and transportation, and energy. Integration with other Yandex services – navigation, delivery, and travel – could enable a fundamentally new class of ecosystem-level products that adapt to weather conditions in real time, aligning operational decisions with continuously updated environmental data.

Forecasts in the Cloud

Within Yandex’s ecosystem, neural networks are moving beyond interface and communication enhancements – such as chatbots and digital assistants – toward solving fundamental scientific and applied problems. The company is building its own AI-powered forecasting core that is globally competitive, positioning machine learning not as a supplementary feature but as a foundational technological asset.

The technology is expected to evolve rapidly, incorporating an expanding range of parameters, with a strong likelihood of international commercialization. Ultimately, winning user trust in weather forecasting will depend not on polished visuals of suns and clouds, but on sophisticated neural network algorithms operating somewhere in the cloud, continuously recalibrating reality into actionable predictions.