We blame meteorologists for a lot.
They ruin camping trips, golf trips, days at the beach.
Why are they always wrong?!
I’m going to say something controversial here.
Weather forecasting isn’t bad.
It’s actually really accurate.
Bare with me.
To get a prediction on the weather, someone has to measure humidity, wind speed, rain,
sun, clouds, dew point, and a hundred other things all over the world.
It’s crazy to think about the amount of data we need just to say if it’s going to
rain on Thursday.
To paraphrase a famous astrophysicist -- “the weather is under no obligation to make sense
to you.”
And yet, we keep trying.
For most of the 20th century, weather forecasting was mediocre because we didn’t have two
things, satellites and supercomputers.
Once we got those, we really knocked it out of the sunny ballpark.
In 1972, we could predict temperatures in a range of plus or minus 6 degrees (~3C).
Like it’s going to be “in the 60s (15-20C)” Now it’s 2 to 3 degrees (~1C).
There’s a big difference between the high 60s and low 60s.
And, we get rain right about 82-percent of the time.
That’s fantastic, considering we didn’t even know what a cold or warm front was 100
years ago.
Like I said though, satellites and supercomputers.
Satellites made weather forecasting amazing.
The first sat to take pictures of clouds over the US was TIROS-1 in April of 1960.
In the first week it spotted a typhoon.
That was huge.
Tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons -- they were difficult to detect before satellites.
We’ve launched dozens of weather sats in the last 57 years, with the newest making
the originals look like the Stone Age.
Now we can see cloud patterns, spot tropical storms as they form, see heat maps, and even
see differences between “clouds, water vapor, smoke, ice and volcanic ash.”
It’s insane.
But as we got more data, it started to just… be too much for our puny human brains to fathom.
Around the turn of the last century numerical weather monitoring was first attempted.
It applied physics of the atmosphere to weather.
Meteorologists divided the world into a grid of small imaginary boxes, and calculated the
weather in each box and how it would affect the boxes around it.
. And it turns out, this is kinda impossible without a computer!
It took a 1920s mathematician three months to predict 24 hours of weather.
Supercomputers can run many millions of these grid calculations per second.
Each time they use real weather data and create a simulation of what could happen.
Humans could not do this… not even close.
Daily, NOAA’s supercomputer pumps through data equal to more than twice the entire printed
collection of the Library of Congress.
Even still, weather models (or simulations) aren’t perfect.
There are lots of them used by different organizations all over the world, and they’re always tweaking
‘em based on new research…And yet, the supercomputer can only get so far.
Humans have to be part of the equation.
The National Weather Service says humans improve rain forecasting by 25-percent, because let’s
be clear, computers only know what we tell them.
They can’t infer or guess; they just calculate.
And it’s not like before sats and supercomputers we knew nothing like Jon Snow.
Before space travel, we used (and still use) radar, balloons, and weather stations spread
across the country and the ocean.
And before electronics, people could look at the sky or read almanacs!
Seriously!
Red sky in the morning sailors warning, has to do with atmospheric thickness, red light
scatters the least -- so it can make it through the thicker air of a possible stormfront.
Stars below a 40 degree angle twinkle normally, but stars overhead don’t.
When the higher-up stars start to twinkle…
rains a-comin’!
Not to mention people kept records of weather on days of the year -- knowing the history
helps us predict the future, but it’s not very precise.
Almanacs are bad weather predictors.
And snow in April doesn’t mean global warming is a hoax.
Weather is big and complicated and global.
We’re still figuring it out.
In the end, stop raining on your local meteorologists parade.
Climate and weather are different things, btw.
I’m not even going to touch that today, But if global warming is real, then is NASA
lying?
Because Antarctic ice is growing!
Find out more about it in this video.
Do you love your local meteorologist?
Tell me your thoughts in the comments, and please take a second and subscribe to the
channel!
Thanks for watching, fam!