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
The answer is probably “no,” the system is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic.
This more generally has been a long-standing question about the universe in general – can you mathematically predict the entire thing from a known starting condition or are certain behaviors inherently random?
Right now things appear to be fundamentally random at the smallest scales – two identical uranium atoms will decay at different times and there is no mathematical model to predict their individual behavior.
Small deviations like this build up in a system and introduce increasingly large levels of variation as you try to predict behavior further in the future.
You can predict tomorrow’s weather based on today’s weather. You can’t predict May 2025’s weather with any confidence at all – the system is extremely complex and chaotic and tiny perturbations will have an entire year to cascade.
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