Why can data models predict the future climate but not the weather?
Why are weather forecasts often wrong but modelling of the future climate highly accurate? I would presume a more complex system over a longer period would be harder to predict.
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> I would presume a more complex system over a longer period would be harder to predict.
You are not wrong, and in part you are onto why it’s harder to predict the weather.
**Weather** is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time. **Climate** is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.
You can think of weather as the very specific details, and Climate as the broad average.
So is it going to rain tomorrow in my town for 30 minutes, is much harder than saying rain is likely in the next month, or the average temperature will rise by 2 degrees.
Hope that makes sense
Who said their climate prediction are highly accurate? And weather prediction is pretty damn accurate. But it’s kinda like sports. I can predict the top teams each year with pretty good accuracy. But I can’t mail down how my hits one player will get in one specific game
Let’s make an analog.
You are able to save on average 2000 a month. That means in 10 years you should have 240.000 on your bankaccount.
This doesn’t mean you will be saving 2k each month. Some months it is 500 and others it is 3k.
In other words we see a trendline which should mean x to the weather. But that doesn’t corrolate directly for the weather we will be having on a daily basis.
I think the predictions people are looking for regarding weather are far more precise.
For example the prediction about climate that comes to my mind is “the average temperature of earth will rise”.
(Stuff like a rising water level are direct conclusions of this one very vague prediction.
But if you are talking about weather you want to know what will the temperature be next Tuesday at exactly 4 pm in this very specific city.
Another thing to keep in my mind with weather you get a new chance to check the predictions everyday.
While with climate it needs a few years to get an answer.
YMMV I guess but the weather forecasts I have seen in the past several years have been extremely accurate.
Because complex systems regress towards a median, in accordance with a model’s predictions, especially over long intervals, whereas short-term predictions are subject to greater volatility. In other words, it’s much easier to say that 1,000 cars will go down the road, than it is to say that car X will take the next off-ramp.
Weather is a product of climate. So while minute weather patterns are too chaotic to predict, the overall contitions which set up these weather patterns are less chaotic and more predictable.
Considering how chaotic weather is, we actually do a really good job with weather prediction. It takes some of our best computers though
(1) Predictions about future climate tend to be very general (things like “average worldwide temperature increase of X degrees”) while weather predictions tend to be a lot more precise (“You’ll see 3-5 inches of rain in this city between 9am and 1pm tomorrow.”) The more precise the prediction, the easier it is to miss.
(2) We don’t really yet know if predictions about the climate are accurate because they’re largely predictions of events that are still to come.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose you have one six-sided die and one twenty-sided die. You roll both of them and keep track of the average values of each die.
You can’t predict in advance what numbers you’ll get on one roll in particular. But over many rolls, you can be confident that the average value of the twenty-sided die will be higher than the average value of the six-sided die.
Predicting the weather is like predicting the value of one particular roll. Predicting the climate is like predicting the average of many rolls.
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