BartSimpson BartSimpson:
DrCaleb DrCaleb:
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
True. It's been observed many times that so far not one computerized weather or climate model has been able to extrapolate the known past based upon current data.
You cannot put a spoon into coffee and unstir the cream.
Nor can you predict what time I'll be adding cream to my coffee any time in the year 2100.
But that isn't a failure of the weather models. It's a function of input data, and weather, and chaotic models in general, only run in a single time direction for a very good reason. Just like cream in the coffee.
If we monitored your coffee cup long enough, we could build a statisical probability of when you put cream in your coffee. The longer the model runs into the future, the less accurate it becomes because it depends on many factors. Like when you make the coffee. But we could never predict when you put cream in your coffee last week, because we'd never know when you made the coffee.
Weather models are exactly the same. High pressure and low pressure systems create the weather, and we can predict when they will move and to some degree what weather they will produce a certain amount in the future. But predictions become less accurate the further ahead in time they predict, because there are too many unknowns. Pressure systems blend together to form other pressure systems, pull the jet stream around to draw other pressure systems in or push them around, and the chaos isn't predictable into the far future. If we know enough about the specifics, even about terrain that affects the weather, the models become more accurate.
That is why the models can't be run in the reverse time direction, because a pressure system doesn't spontaneously generate a high and low pressure system that pushes the jet stream around to push systems in unpredictable ways. Any more than putting the spoon in the coffee at the right time will draw all the cream back on to the spoon.
And the worst part is that the US has defunded a number of weather sattelites that are becomeing obsolete, so weather prediction will become less accurate in the short term too.