"FWIW, the NWS misses its share down here, also -- and for similar reasons, I suspect -- not much actual data coming in from the west. Not as happy a situation as forecasting air mass behavior in the center of the continent, where there is a huge body of information from ground observations in all directions." A Meteorologist named Edward Lorenz, who has been working on computer and mathematical models for weather prediction for decades, has developed many insights into understanding the weather on our planet as a chaotic system. Some would say that he has proven (in theory) that it is mathematically speaking impossible to predict the weather accurately, no matter how detailed the input data, no matter how large the computer, no matter how complex the mathematical model used. For refference read "The Essence of Chaos" by Edward Lorenz, U of W press, Seattle. According to Lorenz, discussing current computer models of worldwide weather , as of late 1991, the worldwide model in (experimental) use had mushroomed to " a system of 5,000,000 (5 million) simultaneous equations in as many variables" and was based on " a horizontal grid of less than 50,000 points, each point must account for more than 10,000 square kilometers. Such an area is large enough to hide a thunderstorm in it's interior." Even a model of this staggering complexity only deals with information on temperature, two wind components, water vapor, and pressure at the surface. Models such as this keep leading researches to ever more precisely defined realizations that when you try to predict the weather you discover that tiny variations in initial conditions lead, in a very short time, to wildly varied outcomes. In a nutshell, the weather IS unpredictable, in any absolute sense. There are general tendencies; with practice we can get good at guessing what the weather MIGHT be. This is the nature of weather, so don't be too hard on the forecaster and never count 100% on a forecast. In another passage in Edward Lorenz's book he describes a weather prediction procedure which "shows signs of becoming the forecast procedure of the future, when computers have become still more powerful. It is known as "Monte Carlo" forecasting. It takes it's name from the famous gambling resort . . ." Nick Lyle *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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