I guess I’m assuming.. Bare bones, everything out there has a scientific reason for acting the way it does. Wind, humidity, temperature, yadda yadda. What randomness is preventing us from entering all the values into a computer program, hitting fast foward, and seeing close to exactly how things will be far down the road?
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Weather is, in the mathematical meaning of the term, chaotic. The tiniest difference at one point can quickly add up to a massive difference later (the so-called “butterfly effect” – a butterfly flaps its wings, and three weeks later a storm takes a different path). And, no – however unintuitive it may be, there’s no such thing as “too small to make a difference”.
To accurately predict the future weather, you would need a perfect model of how the weather works, perfect data about the state of everything featuring in it, and computers capable of putting the two together perfectly. We have none of those, and never will. The best we can do is run the models lots of times, tweak the data each time to allow for the fact that it’s neither complete nor 100% accurate, and look for reasonably common patterns in the results.
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