Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos.
There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.
> Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather.
Like - how the fck would you know? Even more so, why the fck does your ignorance and inability to think of possibilities, or fully grasp the nature of anything make you think that that sort of comment is remotely appropriate.
You have the uniquely fortunate position to never be able to realise how inept and incompetent you are, but putting that on to other people is definitely only showing everyone your ignorance to the facts of life.
And there was no reply - just downvoting people, like a champ...
> Your response is you don’t understand it so nobody else should.
Ah I see. I misinterpreted the _you_ in this sentence (to mean me).
My main points still stand though:
1. weather is well understood to exhibit chaotic behavior (in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense)
2. there is an upper bound to accurate (edit: precise) weather forecasting the farther you predict into the future
As an aside, there was no need to get personal. I wasn’t the downvoter but that is very likely why the comment got flagged.
That’s not what I said. But ok.
Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos.
There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.
> That’s not what I said. But ok.
This is what you did say
> Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather.
Like - how the fck would you know? Even more so, why the fck does your ignorance and inability to think of possibilities, or fully grasp the nature of anything make you think that that sort of comment is remotely appropriate.
You have the uniquely fortunate position to never be able to realise how inept and incompetent you are, but putting that on to other people is definitely only showing everyone your ignorance to the facts of life.
And there was no reply - just downvoting people, like a champ...
No. They're correct and you are not.
Nothing to do with "inability to think of possibilities", it's impossible because of literal physics.
It's like saying perpetual motion machines could exist if we just think outside the box hard enough. No, we don't have them because thermodynamics.
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> Your response is you don’t understand it so nobody else should.
Ah I see. I misinterpreted the _you_ in this sentence (to mean me).
My main points still stand though:
1. weather is well understood to exhibit chaotic behavior (in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense) 2. there is an upper bound to accurate (edit: precise) weather forecasting the farther you predict into the future
As an aside, there was no need to get personal. I wasn’t the downvoter but that is very likely why the comment got flagged.
7 replies →