: 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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To know the weather in the future you need two things: what is the weather now, and how does the weather change over time.
Measurements of anything, including the weather, always have small errors. Your parents may have measured your height with a giant ruler while you were growing up, and there are lines on the ruler that say how tall you are. There are gaps between the lines and if your height is there, the ruler doesn’t give you an exact answer. Also, what if you were standing on your toes a bit. The same thing happens when we measure where all the clouds are, or what direction the wind is currently blowing, we will get small errors. These measurement errors turn into weather prediction errors.
Weather is the motion of a bunch of fluids through each other. People have models to predict how fluids will move, but fluids are very chaotic and can easily change. There are very accurate mathematical models that predict the motion of fluids. They aren’t perfect, so some model error turns into weather prediction error.
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