I’m talking about information displayed on different weather websites. One will say that there’s a very high chance of rain in a place at a certain hour, for multiple hours, and another will say that there will be just some light rain in the first hour, then it will be dry/sunny.
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Weather forecasts rely upon computer simulations, but they are so complex that if you run the same simulations with tiny differences in the input parameters, they can offer wildly different outcomes. Therefore, the forecasters run lots of simulations at the same time in supercomputers, and compare the outcomes. If you get one outcome saying it’ll be sunny in a city the next day, but twenty results suggesting it’ll rain, the forecasters will conclude that it’s most likely to rain and tell everybody to take their umbrellas out. This principle can be repeated for cloud cover, chance of rain/snow, air pressure and temperature. This technique is called “Monte Carlo simulations”, since it relies on statistics and chance, just like casino games. And since it sometimes results in similar chances of different weather predictions, sometimes forecasters choose the alternative choices to their rivals.
TLDR: supercomputers make loads of “Monte Carlo” simulations to determine which forecasts are more likely. Sometimes, when the simulations show different outcomes are equally likely, different forecasts disagree.
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