The actual research this is based on is: "The Quiet Revolution of Numerical Weather Prediction" Bauer, Thorpe, Brunet, 2005.
"Stunningly Accurate" means that 7-day forecasts are now at the lower boundary of being considered "useful" so the bar is not being set very high here.
Still not a lot to quell the skepticism that some reasonable people have about the ability of scientists to accurately predict weather decades in the future.
> Still not a lot to quell the skepticism that some reasonable people have about the ability of scientists to accurately predict weather decades in the future.
It's a common misconception, climatology doesn't predict weather, but climate. And predicting average of weather is easier than predicting specific weather.
It's the same as in a casino. They cannot tell what will be the next throw of dice (weather). But they can calculate (predict) that you will, in the long-term average, lose (climate).
right. climate is a more complex system. more variables. more unknowns. exponentially larger prediction area. unknown base states. so it should be much easier to predict right?
Yes, because the goals of the forecast are different. A weather forecast seeks to predict a future position within the phase space of the system; a climate forecast seeks to predict the overall shape of that phase space.
"It will be 1C warmer in February on average" is a useless prediction if I'm deciding whether or not to wear a heavy coat tomorrow, since day-by-day variability swamps that average. But it is a very useful prediction if I'm designing infrastructure that needs to last 50 years.
Climatology works at a different granularity in time and space from meterology. You can abstract away a lot of detail in climate models and still come out with useful predictions (the article has an example). You can include items like Antarctic sheet melt and Tundra methane release that has almost zero 72-hour effect but will matter deeply in 5, 50, 200 years.
"Stunningly Accurate" means that 7-day forecasts are now at the lower boundary of being considered "useful" so the bar is not being set very high here.
Still not a lot to quell the skepticism that some reasonable people have about the ability of scientists to accurately predict weather decades in the future.