Advances in weather forecasting

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Well your question is really have the computer models improved, the human element in weather forecasting out to about ten days at least is fairly insignificant as every source you might turn to is looking at the same guidance. Sure there's some forecaster skill or experience that comes into play especially when guidance is scattered or marginal for some kind of outcome. That probably hasn't changed, in fact it might have eroded a bit since back in the day forecasters had to analyze their own maps and then draw their own prog charts with some assistance from very rudimentary guidance. As recently as 1980 in a forecast office (I was in one so I can attest to this) the 96h computer model charts were regarded about the same way 10-15 day charts are regarded now, and we would be happy if the 48 and 72h panels proved to be reasonably close to reality. So that part of the technology has improved. The forecasters back then did not slavishly follow those 48h and 72h charts and sometimes managed to improve on them using their experience in similar situations. The idea that half a century ago, people had almost no idea what was going to happen is a bit overblown, weather forecasting was probably better than you imagine even a hundred years ago.

Now as to the question of can we improve ... one approach is of course to throw much money and resources at "improving computers" to glean even more data and process it through to a finished product. The philosophy of my research is, fine go ahead and try that, it might work, I don't know, but what I do suspect is that theory could also improve forecast models if accurate theory is developed, as to what actually causes weather events. We already know more about climate than weather. We understand in basic terms why the climate of any given location is what it is, but we have no working theory of why the weather events within that climate occur (on the specific dates that they occur, we might have ideas about frequency and even seasonal variations because of drivers or teleconnections). But to take today's cold northwest flow as an example, why did that happen today and not two days back, or this day last year, or 22nd January 1876? (perhaps it did, I didn't look at the archives). And there's nobody out there reading this who can answer that question. A few, including myself, are working on theories to explain such variations. I have published what I already have by way of evidence, and I continue to say that the work is a long way from complete and I hope to get further into this before passing. That's probably a subject for a different thread.

But what that tells us (and we might not like to admit this) is that meteorology is not a true science, it's a technology. A true science would be based on predictive theories that produce accurate results, like astronomy uses to tell you when the moon is full and even when it will be in eclipse. In fact, they had some of that worked out thousands of years ago. Somehow, with all the intelligent people who have spent their lives doing weather research, we have so far failed to reach the threshhold of true science with even (to give us a fighting chance) a reasonably accurate 30-day forecast model that matches the accuracy of today's 24 hour computer guidance.

And the obvious reason for that is -- we don't know what causes these weather variations. Now the problem is that many in the field will allow their minds to cloud up with frustrated anger when they read that and go into a "jet stream energy blah blah" sort of "explanation" which I would call metsplaining, a non-explanation dressed up as a "reason" to get the pesky children to go away. But think about this -- if in fact my general approach is correct and the explanation lies in some sort of complicated interference patterns in the atmosphere set off by externally generated gravitational or geomagnetic disturbances, then sooner or later, as with astronomy's advances in understanding orbital dynamics, we would as a community figure this out in detail and get a working model up and running. I've gotten about halfway to the goal of this (I believe anyway) by deriving some parameters for the grid of the interference pattern and some timing aids for low pressure crossing timing lines in that grid. Ireland is near a timing line and I've already discovered that the pressure in the winter months reaches low points about 10-15 mb lower than average near the full and new moon dates. This partially answers one question, why does the ocean respond to lunar tidal forces but not the atmosphere? Well, the main reason why not is that the atmosphere has no coastlines, if we had a global ocean the tides would be equally subtle and hard to detect. But with coastlines, the tidal forces run out of ocean so the water has to return to equilibrium, hence high and low tides. With the atmosphere, the energy is continually rippling around and forming interference patterns. These are harder to model, and because equal numbers of observers are near or distant from timing lines, they form different impressions of how the weather correlates with lunar phase. If you lived between two timing lines (as you would in Berlin, the one place this question was studied in the 19th century) you might be more likely to draw the opposite conclusion, that full and new moons would be times of higher pressure.

So my suggestion to the community (all along since I started this around 1980) is to fund this kind of research, take it seriously, and get thousands of minds investigating it, not just me and a few other cranks here and there, and it will fall eventually, we'll slowly but surely get better and better results. I don't think there's some magic formula like e equals m c squared in the background waiting to be discovered. This will always be more a technology than a lab-experiment sort of precise science. There are thousands of variables in play after the basic external theory is developed too, but I do feel that this approach would not run out of accuracy after thousands of time intervals because it would remain valid at distant points in the future (or past for verification work). A big spanner in the works would be if the actual parameters of the magnetic field played a role, because those have been slowly changing over time. This would mean that weather data from the past would need to be adjusted as to location to become useful in developing said modelling. The north magnetic pole for example has moved from the central Canadian arctic islands to a point between Alaska and the North Pole in just the past seventy years.

Well, long answer, but bazlers, this also answers your p.m. that I neglected to answer previously, I think.

And I should say that this is just my approach, I would not be all that surprised if a totally different philosophical approach proved to be the one we should adopt and that this other approach might deliver the goods. But if I were correct on this, the best you could hope to see would be very gradual incremental improvements in the longer-range portions of existing model runs and extension of those into CFS like products with higher degrees of accuracy. It would not be like in 2019 we had no clue and suddenly in 2023 it all fell together and you could get a 22-day forecast that would be 90% reliable. Probably more like a half century at the very least to get those kinds of improvements.