When I was studying atmospheric physics in undergrad we did an exercise to see how chaos limits the ability to forecast.
My recollection is that if the atmosphere were filled with a 3-D grid of perfect sensors spaced one meter apart, it would still be impossible to do a high accuracy 30-day forecast.
When I visited Himalayas for the first time in winters. I met a man who just told me that noone can exactly predict the weather. He was so correct. When he mentioned this it was a bright sunshine and we were going high up to the mountains. We needed to go just 13 kms by road and it must have taken us hardly 1 hour to reach theere. But suddenly, it started to snowfall and it took us 9 hours to reach our destination. From that day, I never looked for weather predictions anymore
It will be interesting to see how much this changes if/as we switch to deep learning AI based approaches which promise to be much faster and more accurate than simulation models
Also depends where you live. The weather forecasts two decades ago when I lived in the midwestern US were more accurate than they are today where I live now, on the coastline.
There are neither sensors nor radars west of the US west coast because there is no land there. Weather in the northern hemisphere tends to move from west to east. The midwest had (and still has) several days of high-quality data on whatever is incoming, and it's passing over pretty uniform terrain.
When I was studying atmospheric physics in undergrad we did an exercise to see how chaos limits the ability to forecast.
My recollection is that if the atmosphere were filled with a 3-D grid of perfect sensors spaced one meter apart, it would still be impossible to do a high accuracy 30-day forecast.
I learned about chaos theory with the double pendulum:
view on www.youtube.comI think I was I in the same class
I hope not. That would be a pretty big opsec problem for both of us.
When I visited Himalayas for the first time in winters. I met a man who just told me that noone can exactly predict the weather. He was so correct. When he mentioned this it was a bright sunshine and we were going high up to the mountains. We needed to go just 13 kms by road and it must have taken us hardly 1 hour to reach theere. But suddenly, it started to snowfall and it took us 9 hours to reach our destination. From that day, I never looked for weather predictions anymore
I must say the Himalayas seem a little different from the rest of us deal with day to day... :P
Doesn't feel like it to me. Maybe I just remember the days they get it wrong and don't pay much attention to all the days they were right
It will be interesting to see how much this changes if/as we switch to deep learning AI based approaches which promise to be much faster and more accurate than simulation models
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/
It won't.
Neural networks are great at making things that seem real to neural brains. Like machine translations and super-resolution images.
The earth's weather is not a mammalian cortex.
Don’t seem like it in my area lol
😂
Where I live it seems that they have agreed to never get it right haha.
Also depends where you live. The weather forecasts two decades ago when I lived in the midwestern US were more accurate than they are today where I live now, on the coastline.
There are neither sensors nor radars west of the US west coast because there is no land there. Weather in the northern hemisphere tends to move from west to east. The midwest had (and still has) several days of high-quality data on whatever is incoming, and it's passing over pretty uniform terrain.