Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Predicting the weather

I grew up in a world where there was a definite set of things you knew - and one of them was not what would happen with the weather.

The other day I was talking to someone who must have grown up in the same period. We were chatting casually about the weather and she made a comment  - quite seriously - that weather forecasts were usually wrong.

Talking about the weather - snap frozen

Unfortunately she was thirty years out of date. What amazes me is that the weather forecasts are usually so right. It is even possible to have a reasonable stab at guessing what the weather will look like at different times of the same day. How can this be possible in such a short time? It’s just constant work improving data collection, improving models – it must be a science.