: With the incredible technology that we have today, why is it still impossible to have 100% accuracy on predicting the weather?
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Our technologies are always grounded in a mathematical understanding of the natural laws around us. In physics we have equations to accurately describe a great many natural phenoma like electricity, gravity, kinematics, quantum mechanics, etc.
The trouble with weather is that to accurately model it, you would have to be accounting for billions upon billions of particles in the air of all different shapes and sizes, and all of their interactions with the surface of the earth and each other. To do so with conventional physics is obviously impractical and probably will never be practical, it’s just too much processing power required.
We do have equations that give us approximations for how fluids behave over large areas which we can use to generally describe things like weather patterns, but it’s never going to be an exact science using these methods. As a result, we are left with very short term forecasts that are oft changing, giving the appearance that we don’t know how to predict the weather.
It’s not that we don’t, it’s that it’s literally impossible to do it perfectly
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