Why the weather forecast is never actually Wrong...
YES! I stand by that heading. And add that it's also never actually right either...
Ohhh I’ve been keen to publish this for a lil while now… I’m hoping it ruffles some feathers or at the very least piques some interest.
The TL;DR is: I argue the weather forecast is not a binary condition of wrong or right; it can only be more or less accurate which is also non-binary - it is a range.
I have the immense pleasure of hosting a once-monthly online get-together to talk all things weather, affectionately known as Weathernurd Klub (or for short: ☀️WNKlub⚡. We also live by the unofficial motto of “Makin’ weather talk BIG again”). Our topic for February 2022 was the exact heading for this piece, and I offer to yee the subsequent video extract below.
The pithy stuff begins at 3:01mins (feel free to skip forward there :) )
If you’d rather read a few slides and skip the entrance of moving pictures, I’ve added the slides for yee too.
For this thought experiment, we begin with pausing (and measuring) reality, as it currently is:
Which leads us to a range of possibilities (based on the initial conditions):
Within which we can infer a range of probabilities (primarily based on reading past patterns in consideration with the initial conditions):
Now we can make a projection - aka a forecast - in a range of likelihood:
And that’s pretty much it! Makes sense, yeah? The only step left is to fire up your imagination and slide the current conditions one unit toward the righthand frame in our image, the next Now. This brings you the opportunity to begin the process again, for our new Next, our new Next-Next, and our new Next-Next-Next. Easy as!
For the fullness of this piece I cannot finish up without adding some further pointers that help elucidate just why forecasting is such a tricky and skilful (but not quite a dark) art:
our capacity to measure the Current Conditions is one very limiting factor; that coupled with that fact that reality just won’t sit still long enough for us to measure it all. Damn reality, always a-changin’!
taking the above point into consideration, we have developed some incredible tools (e.g very fast computers) that do allow for greater accuracy further ahead; you may recall that our everyday public weather forecasts have grown from 3-5 days, then 5-7 days, and now out to 10 days (depending on your source). Recall however, the further ‘ahead’ or the more “if this then thats” we include in a forecast the less accurate it can be;
as there are so many layers of granularity for us to account for, there’s a limit to how far we might be able to forecast, EVEN with the bestest most superduper computers we may yet invent. Why? Simply because stuff hasn’t happened yet, so the variables are too many. Or you could just say: Chaos Theory. Might be I’m wrong and one day we do have a #QuantumiPhone that forecasts the weather 25 days ahead… along with predicting your mood and personal interactions that far ahead too. Ergh. No thanks. I like my relationships chock full of Chaos Theory please, and thank you.
PS: Exciting news to share: You can now read Grounding the Restless Spirit in the new Substack app for iPhone.
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