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
Weather is a classic example of a *chaotic* system. In casual conversation, “chaotic” implies randomness, but here I mean it in reference to the field of study called “chaos theory”. Chaos Theory studies deterministic systems that are very sensitive to initial conditions, or “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”. This means that while a chaotic system is *theoretically* perfectly predictable, in practice, small errors in measurements grow exponentially as you try to predict further and further in the future.
We have a solid understanding of how weather works, but we’re limited by the accuracy of our measurements and the level of detail of our computer models. We can’t measure or model every atom in the atmosphere, every droplet of a cloud, or every tiny bit of turbulence. Due to the chaotic nature of the weather, these limitations very quickly limit how far into the future we can accurately predict. We have **really good** measurements and models that let us predict the weather **really well** over a period of 5 days, but as you push the prediction further into the future, the accuracy rapidly drops off.
You’re right that satellites provide a wealth of data for meteorologists, but they have their limits. The data they provide only has so many significant figures and so much granularity – they can’t constantly measure the temperature of every cubic meter of air to thousandths of a degree. To improve how far we can predict a *tiny* bit would require *massively* better measurements and more detailed models.
Maybe in our lifetimes we’ll have somewhat accurate two-week forecasts, but multiple months in advance is practically impossible.
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