Watching the weather report this morning and they said there will likely be 15cm of new snow. How do they work this out?
In: 7
#ELI5
On Thursdays, the drive home from work takes you about 30 minutes.
But on Thursdays when the local NFL team is playing that night, the drive home takes you 50 minutes. All that extra traffic from people driving to the game, slows you down.
Every time there’s a local NFL game, it takes longer for you to get home.
So pretend it’s Thursday morning, and your wife asks what time you’ll be home after work.
Normally, you’d say you’d be home in 30 minutes. But you check the game schedule, and you see your team is playing tonight.
Knowing this, you tell your wife it will take you 50 minutes to get home.
IN A SIMPLE WAY, it’s like that with meteorology.
“Most of the time, when it’s been 40 degrees with 71% humidity on a Tuesday, it rains on Wednesday”.
They literally study the weather characteristics, and try to see patterns. When the team plays, *usually* traffic is worse. And when there’s certain weather conditions on a Tuesday, *usually* this specific thing happens on Wednesday.
It’s a lot more complicated than that. They take into account temperature, humidity, wind, sun/clouds, and a lot more. They also consider the last several days, maybe even the last two weeks, not just the day before.
But in a nutshell, that’s it. They see repeated patterns over and over, and they can then use those patterns to predict what will most likely happen.
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