Comment by purplemoonx
15 hours ago
Predicting big weather events is not that hard even with 50 year old technology.
What's hard is predicting details, like exactly where it will rain, what the slope of the beach is today (many people don't even know this changes drastically daily and why it is important), wave height, ocean depth today where people swim, water temperature, shorebreak, and knowing with certainty when rain becomes ice/sleet/snow and what routes will be affected, accurate wind speed, accurate temperature throughout different parts of the region, and what the weather next week will be.
We can't do any of those things with conventional equipment, but we can with training data and algorithms. So I'm very excited about the role of algorithmic prediction in weather, but not for the kind we already know how to forecast (without AI) but being able to glean useful insights that matter to people who live, work and play in the weather.
> what the slope of the beach is today (many people don't even know this changes drastically daily and why it is important
So why is it important? As far as I know the slope changes AFTER the weather not before as a prediction mechanism but happy to learn
It changes constantly on a daily cycle and also on a larger seasonal cycle.
Slope defines the water depth and what kind of beach it is - long flat beach means shallow water, steep beach means deep water - it affects if you can you fish there, route lagoon systems and seasonal floodwater, do sports like surfing and skimboarding which are highly dependent on it to the point you can only do it some times of day only part of the year, and other things like whether or not it’s safe to be on that day for visitors.
In California, a beach can be flat and inches deep in the Spring at low tide, and be 20ft deep in Winter at high tide with a massive hill you can’t even stand on with basically a river running thru it. That same massive hill can turn into a literal cliff drop off 25ft to a flat beach below overnight. So you come back 24h later and it’s a massive cliff now. Come back 8 hours after that and it’s like a massive flat puddle revealing hundreds of yards of exposed land.
It’s not random either, it happens in cycles that you observe if you go there daily to fish or surf, but none of the weather or surf apps can ever predict it.
A great example is the amazing skimboarding conditions in Laguna Beach and Santa Cruz during the fall (October, November) there's nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
Another good example is surfing the winter swell in Santa Cruz, when a good majority of the beach disappears underwater for months. A wave you're surfing on Halloween is where someone will be laying out tanning in June.