by The staple of casual conversation – the unexpected state of the weather – is under existential threat. Scientists plan to make forecasts so accurate that they will be able to determine weather patterns one month into the future.
The woes of Wimbledon’s barbeques and laundry could have a big impact – thanks to a new 15-year research program launched by the University of Reading, in partnership with the Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The aim is to change our ability to resolve the minute impacts that weather patterns reveal and reveal the limits of predictability in the real world.
“Being able to predict what the weather will be like a month ahead is a major goal of our work,” said Professor Rowan Sutton, dean of environmental research at Reading – although he stressed that it was impossible to predict precise. , a month ahead whether a particular day was sunny or rainy.
“However, we would hope to be able to say that we are likely to have a period of very wet and very windy weather – or that we will enjoy sunny weather – four weeks before a certain date,” a he said. “That won’t guarantee you’ll have sunshine on your wedding day but it will undoubtedly have many useful applications – for farmers or energy companies, for example.”
Accurate weather forecasts will become more important as the planet evolves and more and more extreme weather events occur, scientists say. Due to worsening storms and droughts, it will become increasingly important to emphasize their arrival time to save life and property.
Meteorologists can make forecasts more than a week in advance with reasonable accuracy. These save the UK billions of pounds a year by providing warnings of impending storms, floods, droughts, and the possibility of airline flight disruptions, and they also help energy companies estimate the meteorological conditions will affect power generation.
This is a big improvement on the 1970s, when forecasts were only accurate a day or two in advance. “As a general rule, we have improved the predictability of our weather forecasts by a day every decade since the middle of the last century,” said Professor Sarah Dance, a data assimilation expert at Reading’s meteorology department.
To achieve this precision, massive streams of data are collected from automated weather stations that dot the countryside, deep-water buoys that warn of incoming Atlantic storms, weather balloons, transponders on aircraft and ships and satellites. Billions of bytes of information are then fed into some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, creating models of weather patterns and the changes likely to affect them. The end result is the creation of forecasts of great accuracy many days in advance.
Now scientists are trying to push these developments further – although meteorologists admit there will be limits to such improvements. The number of variables involved in calculating weather patterns is enormous, and will eventually combine and overwhelm attempts at long-term prediction. However, there are ways to overcome some of these uncertainties, they say, and a new University of Reading program – titled At the Edge of the Earth System – is designed to address them.
“Cities are a good example,” says Professor Chris Merchant, an expert in ocean and land observation. “Buildings and roads are not included in current climate models, but they can have a profound effect on the weather.
“Think of London and a place like Hyde Park. Sometimes it is a cool place during heat waves. At other times, it can be very hot. It depends on how much moisture there is in the ground. Factors like that need to be factored into the data we use to make our forecasts,” said Merchant, project leader of the Reading forecasting program.
Understanding urban responses to weather can often be more complex than rural responses, he said. “You might get heavy rain but current models can’t differentiate between gardens and parks or concrete and roads. The things we use to build a city can have an impact and we need to factor variables like this into our models.”
Related: The mystery of the cold: the snowflake expert who fears a warmer world
Another issue involved data usage, Dance with it. “Right now, we can only use about 5% of the data we get from all our sources. We need to find more ways to use that data and work at finer and finer scales. That will certainly give us a more accurate picture of what is going on.”
Professor Pier Luigi Vidale, scientific director of the program, supported this point. “We’re starting to sort things out at finer and finer resolutions, not just in the atmosphere but in the oceans, which gives us a much better understanding of how they transport heat from the equator to the poles and they influence the ways storms develop and lead. winds and rain to our shores. That will also help our forecasts.”
The results of the program would be important on many levels, he said. “Right now, we don’t fully understand how predictable real life is. So we’re trying to develop a theoretical understanding of what’s going on and use that to find out what the limits of predictability are. But it is not just an intellectual exercise. If this is done right, we are going to make a huge difference to people’s lives.”
