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 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.
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