Chaos – why the weatherman can never be (exactly) right

[4seasons]

Blog met 2 animatie-video's


Chaos is a fundamental feature of many physical systems – the atmosphere primary among them – that places a strict limit on the predictability of those systems.
For the atmosphere this has obvious consequences, namely that we cannot accurately predict local weather beyond about a week.
Edward Lorenz was the first to discover chaos in 1960, and all subsequent studies are based on his pioneering work.

Figure 1.
Animation showing unstable, chaotic convection in an annulus as described in the text. The colours represent temperature and density – red is warm and less dense, and blue is the opposite. The graph in the centre shows the average direction that the fluid is moving, at the time given by the moving vertical line. When the blue line crosses the horizontal line at y=0, the fluid changes direction

Figure 3.
As Figure 1, but for steady convection

Gehele blog op:
https://changingtheclimateblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/chaos-why-the-weatherman-can-never-be-exactly-right/


Meer en ander info op:
https://changingtheclimateblog.wordpress.com/