Elephant in the room: There are factors like volcanos and human involvement that create unpredictable variables
As above. And let me lead with this: I’m a smart guy, but i know little about meteorology. My question is grounded in ignorance.
Right now we can predict with relative accuracy storms and events 3-7 days out, depending on the scope of the storm. Temperatures are even ‘easier’.
It seems like we’re close (if not already there) to having global weather data at all times. We live in a world of scientific order, so shouldn’t we be able to create a model that very accurately predicts specific weather on a long timeline?
Exa: I’m ignorant in meteorology, but I would think all of the fronts and movements that will lead to a hurricane in the Atlantic in 2025 are already in motion. Couldn’t we track that *now*? Play out the equation, so to speak?
And then we’d be able to reverse engineer the moments that disrupted the model, to accurately determine what artificially affected the weather pattern.
Thanks! And sorry if I’m dumb.
In: Planetary Science
In theory, yes, but we need a time-traveling magic supercomputer.
The reality is the weather depends on so many variables, making a great simulation of it for further than 3-7 days out would take our current computers more than 3-7 days to complete. A forecast isn’t very useful if it takes longer to get it than just waiting for the weather to happen.
So our models are simplified, focus on the near future, and omit things that we know don’t usually cause “big” differences. Just in case they do, we have multiple models and some of them omit different things. Meteorologists look at all of them and, in the end, go with an educated hunch which one will be right.
As we get stronger computers and more worldwide sensors, we can get more accurate. But we’re still a very long way away from a true, very accurate model of weather. We also occasionally discover new things impacting weather we weren’t accounting for. I’ve seen some theories and convincing data that changes in shipping traffic can change weather patterns in areas, including one theory that an industry switch to different emissions standards caused measurable changes. We’re encountering things like “the warmest average ocean temperatures in recorded history”. When we don’t have recorded history that means we’re pretty bad at understanding how those conditions affect the weather. We have to observe it and record it before it can become part of our models.
So right now? We don’t really have evidence that we CAN truly predict the weather. But we can’t mathematically seal the deal that we’ll NEVER be able to do it, either. If there is some major breakthrough in computing, like a new model that increases our computational ability by several thousandfold, we’ll have to redefine a lot of “impossibles”. That sounds like a big deal, and it is. But it was accomplished once within the last 2 or 3 lifetimes.
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