What did meteorologists have to learn to be able to reliably predict the weather accurately?
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I’m not the expert, but I learned some facts today that I can explain for 5 year olds. Hurricanes seem to be bigger when water is more hot.
Gulf of Mexico measured over 100°F this year. Someone’s getting a new rain jacket!
The first forecasts started in England in the 1840s after the telegraph was invented. They used air pressure, wind direction, and observations from ports to predict stormy weather that could disrupt the shipping industry.
Edit: to elaborate, it’s a lot more about the communication between weather stations than the ability to predict the weather in any one place. These days, the observations come from satellites as well as on the ground so the accuracy has improved immensely. There is a great docuseries on Netflix called Connected and the episode called Clouds explores this topic from the beginning through to modern methods.
In the UK during the 90s my class went to visit a local house. He had a Stevenson screen in his back garden. That holds all the instrumentation for the owner to send data to the national weather service. I think the NWS would collate that information from across the country to provide a prediction for the day
A decent knee or shoulder injury can give you a lifetime of accurate weather information………not sure if meteorologists use this method.
Sorry but what? You do realize that if they did nothing more than say “tomorrow’s weather will be like today” their accuracy would skyrocket.
Even though there is a lot of scientific basis for weather prediction, you might as well be trusting your horoscope.
They do their best but weather prediction is a VERY complicated and hard nut to crack that may never be solved.
I am pretty late here, but I wanted to give perhaps a slightly different view. I am a forecaster but I don’t feel I had to learn anything crazy.
My short answer here:
In today’s world, the basic behaviors of weather can be learned and applied to current conditions using the many tools available to predict how it will change.
My long answer:
It kinda depends on what you mean “accurately”. As noted elsewhere, people starting to track air pressure, temperature, and winds started to be able to forecast future weather conditions based on observed patterns over time.
What is available today is way more advanced than even 15 years ago.
I am an Air National Guard meteorologist. We are taught a tiny bit of general theory (certainly no higher level maths or physics), and then a bunch of applications of that theory and forecasting rules (Weather tech school is 8 months.) The models used to be just things to consider within your forecast process. Nowadays, a lot of people just follow what the model says. There is often still an interpretation needed from looking at model data to enhance accuracy further. Also, it can be a lot more challenging forecasting overseas, in data-sparse environments where you might only have 2 or 3 (or zero!) weather observation stations in the entire country.
We can definitely produce accurate forecasts, even without models. (Although those skills would be extremely rusty for everyone, including me).
I would probably consider what we learn to be the bare bones of just “being able to forecast” without knowing much of the underlying theory.
Ex: Why does an air parcel moving through a short-wave trough experience vorticity, and how does that vorticity change the properties of the air parcel?
I have no idea. I just know that troughs are associated with positive vorticity advection, which is an indicator of instability.
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