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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Last month, as much of the United States shivered in Arctic cold, weather models predicted a seemingly implausible surge of balmy, springlike warmth. A week later, that unlikely forecast came true—testimony to the remarkable march of such models. Since the 1980s, they’ve added a new day of predictive power with each new decade. Today, the best forecasts run out to 10 days with real skill, leading meteorologists to wonder just how much further they can push useful forecasts.
A new study suggests a humbling answer: another 4 or 5 days. In the regions of the world where most people live, the midlatitudes, “2 weeks is about right. It’s as close to be the ultimate limit as we can demonstrate,” says Fuqing Zhang, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College who led the work, accepted for publication in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
Forecasters must contend with the atmosphere’s turbulent flows, which nest and build on each other as they create clouds, power storms, and push forward cold fronts. A tiny disruption in one layer of turbulence can quickly snowball, infecting the next with its error. A 1969 paper by Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz introduced this dynamic, later dubbed the “butterfly effect.” His research showed that two nearly identical atmospheric models can diverge widely after 2 weeks because of an initial disturbance as minute as a butterfly flapping its wings.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday February 19 2019, @01:55PM (4 children)
What's imaginary about it? Integration is a well-known thing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:38PM
You can plug any numbers into an equation, doesn't mean the results have physical meaning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:46PM (2 children)
If I measure the energy content of two regions A and B, I can add A + B to get "total energy". Can I do that for temperature?
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:09PM
Probably [wikipedia.org], but I don't remember how to do it.
Eventually the black body radiation of the two bodies will have warmed up the one and cooled down the other to equilibrium.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:01PM
That's not even wrong territory. The existence of addition doesn't tell you anything about whether the values in question are real or imaginary in an existence sense. But if we were to add average temperatures in a sensible way, the way to do it would be the average temperature of A times the area of A plus the average temperature of B times the area of B divided by the total area of A and B.