Weather in perspective
Nov. 30th, 2003 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wxkatGot this one in e-mail from my boss. You've probably read it before, but in case you haven't, here it is, for your reading enjoyment.
In case you wonder why weather forecasters can't seem to get the weather right:
Imagine a system on a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles wide, consists of different materials, different gasses that have different properties (one of the most important of which, water, exists in different concentrations), heated by a nuclear reaction 98 million miles away. Then, just to make life interesting, this sphere is oriented such that, as it revolves around the nuclear reactor, it is heated differently at different locations at different times of the year. Then, someone is asked to watch the mixture of gasses, a fluid only 20 miles deep, that covers an area of 250 million square miles, and to predict the state of that fluid at one point on the sphere two days from now. This is the problem that weather forecasters face.
(source: Robert T. Ryan, WRC TV, Washington DC, Sep 10, 1981)
In case you wonder why weather forecasters can't seem to get the weather right:
Imagine a system on a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles wide, consists of different materials, different gasses that have different properties (one of the most important of which, water, exists in different concentrations), heated by a nuclear reaction 98 million miles away. Then, just to make life interesting, this sphere is oriented such that, as it revolves around the nuclear reactor, it is heated differently at different locations at different times of the year. Then, someone is asked to watch the mixture of gasses, a fluid only 20 miles deep, that covers an area of 250 million square miles, and to predict the state of that fluid at one point on the sphere two days from now. This is the problem that weather forecasters face.
(source: Robert T. Ryan, WRC TV, Washington DC, Sep 10, 1981)
