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posted by mrpg on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the clouds-are-flat dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday February 19 2019, @09:53PM

    by arslan (3462) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @09:53PM (#803694)

    50% chance of rain - they're almost always right.

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