Is it possible for weather forecasts to extend months into the future? This idea, long considered pure fantasy, has been revealed by a new scientific study to be scientifically feasible. An international research team has shown that the theoretical maximum for accurate weather forecasts can reach 129 days, after which no weather forecast, however precise, can provide any information about the future.
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The research team included researchers from the University of Miami, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The authors of the study point out that this discovered limit does not mean that realistic weather forecasts can be made, but it sets, for the first time, a theoretical ceiling for human ambition in forecasting the atmosphere, and this ceiling is nine times higher than the fourteen days that our current models are still able to provide useful information about.
In other words, as Zoltan Toth, a researcher at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of the lead authors, stated in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Net, there is still "ample room for improvement" to be explored.
Since the beginnings of weather forecasting using simulation models in the 1950s, meteorologists have been preoccupied with a pressing question about the maximum extent to which the forecasting horizon can be extended.
The mathematician Edward Lorenz, the father of "chaos theory" known for the idea that the air disturbance caused by a butterfly's wing could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, predicted the existence of this limit, but until now, no researcher has been able to accurately determine this limit, due to the difficulty of measuring the impact of small errors on the accuracy of predictions.
The press release from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences summarizes the predicament this discipline has found itself in: previous approaches have relied almost entirely on observing the growth of small errors over time, a method that is inherently blind because it reveals nothing about errors that have not been observed before.
Wei Zhang makes this very clear in this press release: How can one claim success in long-term predictions without being able to prove it in any way?
Instead of exhausting themselves searching for these errors, the authors of the new study wondered if there was a radically different perspective for addressing this age-old question, says Zoltan. Instead of tracing the path of the error, the researchers started with the fundamental laws of energy flow through our atmosphere.
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