PERFECT FANTASY FORECAST

My colleagues and I often get remarks from people who complain we can’t get the forecast right. And you know what? We never will. In fact a perfect forecast will always be a fantasy. Unlike other sciences, like physics or medicine, you have specific measureable data that will give you exact results on an experiment. Computer models are the backbone to the forecast experiment. Weather forecasting is imprecise because there is no perfect knowledge of atmospheric conditions around the world at any one time. Computers rely on exact data to solve complex mathematical equations, but since this information is not available an approximation is used to take a snapshot of weather happening over the globe. These initial conditions are used by computer models to emulate what the weather will do in the future. And here is the problem CHAOS!

The meteorologist who developed the Chaos theory died at the age of 90 on Wednesday. Edward Lorenz was a brilliant Meteorologist at MIT who ran numerical simulations of the atmosphere on a computer in the 1960s. He discovered that if you change the beginning parameter settings between two models just ever so slightly, the end results would differ completely from each other.

In weather there are two many unaccounted features going on around the world. These unaccounted conditions produce large variations in the long term.  In school, I remember hearing about a famous chaos theory analogy called the butterfly effect which best explains chaos.  A butterfly’s wings create small atmospheric changes that ultimately cause a hurricane to form or dissipate. The flapping wings set off changes in the initial conditions that manifest into a larger phenomenon. But if the wings didn’t flutter, the unique weather conditions that formed the hurricane may have been altered. So the next time a forecast is a bust CHAOS is my

 scapegoat.