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Predicting extreme weather events and tracking severe storms with speed and accuracy requires unbelievable computing power. In a major shift for global meteorology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is officially moving its operational supercomputing infrastructure off-premises and into the public cloud.
According to a new post on the Google Cloud Blog, NOAA has selected Google Cloud as its primary high-performance computing (HPC) partner for the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS).
Powering massive weather simulations on H4D VMs
The shift marks one of the world’s first operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) centers to transition entirely to cloud-first infrastructure.
To execute these massive, tightly coupled simulations, NOAA is leveraging Google Cloud’s H4D Virtual Machines, powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors. Purpose-built for compute-heavy workloads, these instances provide the massive processing power and ultra-low latency networking required to run complex atmospheric models in real time.
Google likens the infrastructure upgrade to moving from a fleet of individual delivery vans navigating city traffic to a synchronized convoy on a dedicated superhighway, allowing petabytes of atmospheric data to be processed as a single, unified engine.
Expanding a long-term scientific partnership
While this HPC migration is a massive milestone, it builds on years of existing collaboration between NOAA and Google. NOAA has used Google Workspace since 2011, and the agency previously leveraged Google DeepMind and Google Research’s WeatherNext model to predict major hurricane landfalls days in advance.
Looking forward, the agency is also exploring agentic AI tools powered by Gemini for Government to help meteorologists parse complex environmental datasets faster. By pairing Google Cloud’s scale with NOAA’s scientific expertise, the move is designed to make global weather modeling faster, more reliable, and more adaptable as new modeling innovations emerge over the coming years.
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