As everyone knows, weather forecasting is not an exact science, and we don't always get it right. The primary reason for this is our dependence on numerical weather models that attempt to predict the future state of the atmosphere, and hence derived variables such as rainfall and snowfall amounts for a specific geographic region. The meteorologists role in this process is to look at a variety of model output, and determine which one, if any, you believe is telling the truth while using past experience and local knowledge. As evidenced this past weekend, that can be a challenge at times.
The culprit that eludes us in making an exact forecast every time lies in Chaos theory. I was watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory recently, and in the episode Dr. Cooper (Sheldon) brilliantly explains chaos theory to the gang. I love the writers of the show for getting the science right most of the time. So I thought I would share this with everyone, so the next time you're wondering why we got the forecast so wrong, you will think back to Sheldon.
After watching the video, you will appreciate our latest attempts in forecasting using ensemble prediction systems. This is where a modeling center artfully perturbs the initial state of the atmosphere in members of the same model run, and this yields differing results in the forecast. We now use these to determine the variance in a given model solution, which can also provide insight into the probability of a certain event occurring. But the low down is that you can blame mathematicians for our inability to exactly predict the future state of the atmosphere. If they could only determine how to solve second order partial differential equations in a non-linear environment exactly, without using numerical approximations, we might indeed have perfect forecasts. However, I will likely not be around when this happens, so until then, lots of science and a little bit of art still makes a good forecaster, along with thick skin and a short memory.
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"Climatology is what you expect, Weather is what you get".
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong".
Too bad future generations aren't here to see all the great things we are spending their $$ on!!
