: With the incredible technology that we have today, why is it still impossible to have 100% accuracy on predicting the weather?
In: 551
I think a good ELI5 answer is that weather is really complicated and depends on a lot of different factors. Temperature, air pressure, wind, humidity etc. etc. etc. Getting precision measurement of all these factors from many different places is hard. But we can do it really really well.
If we just replace the whole thing with just a number we can predict the weather with really high precision, 5 decimal places!
So we can predict the weather to be: 56.45381
But the problem is that the weather is “chaotic”, meaning that even the slightest change can make a huge difference.
The difference between 56.45381**3** and 56.45381**5** can be thick grey clouds and rain or sparse light clouds and mostly sunshine.
The tiniest variables can make a huge difference. And we simply can’t gather enough data or calculate it precisely enough to make better predictions.
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