Tag Archives: weather

weather forecasting

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This is interesting. It is not 100% clear to me what the measure of accuracy is below, but the plot shows how much weather forecasting has improved over the last 50 years or so. A 3-5 day forecast is highly accurate now, and 3-5 are not that different. It’s interesting to me that there is such as large drop off in accuracy between a 7 and 10 day forecast – that is not necessarily intuitive, but useful even in everyday life. A 10-day forecast is basically a coin flip, while check back 3 days later and you are closer to 80/20 odds. This is based on pressure measured at a certain height I think, so it doesn’t necessarily mean forecasts of precipitation depth and intensity, rain vs. snow vs. ice, thunder and lightning, tornadoes, etc. are going to be as accurate as this implies.

Our World in Data

There is some suggesting that AI (meaning purely statistical approaches, or AI choosing any blend of statistics and physics it wants?) might make forecasting much faster, cheaper, and easier yet again.

July 2022 in Review

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I have been traveling and unable to overcome my own security features while outside the US. Ironically, during the first time in years I had some significant downtime for reading, thinking, and posting. Not to worry, I thumb-typed out a few posts and am cutting and pasting them now, so the posts should keep rolling in for awhile.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.

Most hopeful story: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: You can see lightning as much as 100-200 miles away if it is high enough, but the sound from thunder only travels about 15 miles. So if you hear thunder, lightning is close enough to be dangerous and you should take shelter. If you only see lightning far away, you may be able to safely stay outside. Just keep listening.

what is “heat lightning”?

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So-called heat lightning is a thunderstorm that is very tall and very far away. According to this article, sound from thunder will only travel about 15 miles, but if lightning is high enough you can see it 100-200 miles away. So this suggests to me that if you hear thunder, the storm is probably close enough you should go inside to be safe, but if you only see lightning and don’t hear thunder (assuming you are in a reasonably quiet location), it might be okay to stay outside.

weather control

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Here is some new research on chaos theory and the so-called “butterfly attractor“. The idea is that by making small-scale interactions with the atmosphere, for example by speeding up or slowing down wind turbines, it might be possible to influence the development of extreme events. This is all theoretical and simulation-based at this point, but if it is true it would certainly be easier, more reversible and less risky than schemes such as releasing massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere.

weather forecasting history

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I recently wrote about earthquake forecasting and how many scientists think it is essentially impossible. But it is interesting to compare that with the state of weather forecasting in the 1800s:

Before the Royal Charter storm, FitzRoy had been agitating in London for government funding for collection of weather data. He and other Victorian men of meteorology knew that the more they could parse what the weather had done in the past, the better they could warn what it might do in the future. FitzRoy called the concept “forecasting.” To show just how ludicrous that idea seemed at the time, Moore unearths a telling 1854 Commons debate. When a scientifically enthusiastic member of Parliament suggested that amassing weather observations from sea and land could someday mean “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand,” laughter broke out raucously enough to stop the proceeding.

Moore

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Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.

…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.