why does predicting things in space (outside the planet) seem to be a lot easier than predicting weather on Earth?
In: Physics
There aren’t that many variables in deep space. There’s only a few nearby objects massive enough to exert meaningful gravitational influence and so things move very much like clockwork. Eclipses and transits can be predicted with extreme accuracy many years in advance.
Weather is a much more complicated system driven by fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in gases and liquids on a planetary scale. It’s not a dozen cosmic billiard balls moving in circles, it’s a nearly infinite number of molecules sloshing around unpredictably.
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