eli5: If weather is caused by the sun influencing air pressure, moisture and temperature, why is the weather today not exactly the same as 365 days ago, even though the sun is at the exact same angle it was back then?
In: Earth Science
It’s not the same angle. Our orbit changes a bit every year. These changes follow a pattern. The sun it’s self has a pattern of increasing and decreasing output. Combine that with the earth isn’t a perfectly flat sphere. It has land masses of varying shapes and sizes. This all combines with even more factors to cause our varying weather.
It’s influenced by a lot more than just the sun. Weather is always the first example to be mentioned when explaining chaos theory because it’s incredibly complicated. That’s why weather predictions are only vaguely accurate even though we collect huge amounts of data. Have you heard of the butterfly effect?
The wind plays a very large role, the position of the moon is a factor, the clouds are very important and countless other things factor in as well. It’s very hard to break down into an easy explanation. We don’t have the computing power to calculate it to a higher degree of accuracy yet.
The long-term change of the weather (so climate change) is quite complicated too and what they do is basically break down the earth into smaller cubes, they can then measure. The most important thing to measure is the flow through those cubes (ergo water and wind) and by using supercomputers those cubes can be made smaller and smaller and the models can be made more accurate.
Like you’re five? Well there are many many complex things that affect the weather. A volcano putting dust into the air, pollution from traffic, even thin clouds of dust in space. You never get exactly the same situation twice.
Mor complicated: we can model the weather off current conditions and the closer we are to a given time frame the more accurate the predictions are. For example, we are now predicting a warm spring for Europe which will be coming in about a month and a half. This is based on over a century of recording weather patterns. How warm, or how much rain or when it will come is still foggy because it’s quite a ways away. But we can predict with high confidence that a given region will or will not get rain tomorrow, by tracking the current weather. We can also tell the time that rain will appear within about 15-30 minutes.
Because it isn’t just due to the sun. Weather is a complex interplay of the hydrosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and to an extent, the biosphere as well. While the sun does play a certain amount on the weather patterns, other factors such a water currents, the lunar cycle, and the Ozone layer, also play a major part on the weather.
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