: With the incredible technology that we have today, why is it still impossible to have 100% accuracy on predicting the weather?
In: 551
Because weather is chaotic (in a mathematical sense).
In a well behaved system, if you change the inputs a little bit, the outputs also change a little bit. Think about bouncing a ball. If you drop the ball onto a flat surface from one height, then drop it from a slightly different height, it’s going to do roughly the same thing. It’s going to bounce back up, almost but not quite to the height you dropped it from. If you drop it a few inches to the right or left, it’s going to do basically the same thing. A tiny change in how or where you bounce the ball isn’t going to make a huge change to the outcome. You can pretty easily bounce and catch the ball.
Weather does not do this. It’s more like dropping a ball onto an uneven surface, with bumps and dips in an irregular pattern. If you drop it in one place, the ball will bounce straight up, but if you drop it just a little way away, where the floor is angled in a different direction, it’s going to go off in a totally different direction. Bouncing and catching the ball is going to be a lot harder in this scenario.
To catch a ball, you need to predict where it’s going to go. That’s hard if you’re bouncing the ball on an irregular surface. The irregular surface is going to make small changes in where you drop the ball into big changes in where it ends up. Weather is like this- small changes get magnified into big changes, in a way that’s hard to predict. You would need extremely precise measurements of all the variables like temperature, air pressure, humidity, and so on to predict what it’s going to do tomorrow. If you get your measurements wrong by a tiny bit (and remember, no measurement can be perfect), you can be way off in your prediction of what’s going to happen.
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