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
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.
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