The mainstay of everyday conversation – the contingency of the weather – is under existential threat. Scientists plan to make predictions accurate enough to determine the weather next month.
BBQ misery and Wimbledon defeats could take a serious hit, 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 goal is to transform our ability to uncover the immediate impacts that determine weather and reveal the limits of real-world predictability.
Professor Rowan Sutton, Reading’s Dean of Environmental Research, said: “The main aim of our study is to be able to tell what the weather will be like a month from now,” but emphasized that it would not be possible to predict with certainty. , a month in advance whether a particular day will be sunny or rainy.
“However, we hope to be able to say that four weeks before a certain date we will either experience a period of very wet and windy weather or enjoy sunny weather,” he added. “This 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.”
As the planet warms and more extreme weather events occur, accurate weather forecasts in advance will become increasingly important, scientists say. Worsening storms and droughts will mean that emphasizing the timing of their arrival will be increasingly important for saving lives and property.
Meteorologists can now make reasonably accurate forecasts more than a week in advance. These provide warnings about approaching storms, floods, droughts and the potential for airline flight disruptions, saving the UK billions of pounds a year and also helping energy companies predict how meteorological conditions will affect energy production.
This is a huge improvement from the 1970s, when forecasts were accurate only a day or two in advance. “As a general rule, we have increased the predictability of our weather forecasts by one day every decade since the middle of the last century,” said Prof Sarah Dance, an expert in data assimilation in Reading’s department of meteorology.
To achieve this precision, large streams of data are collected from automatic weather stations located in the countryside, deep-sea buoys that warn of incoming Atlantic storms, weather balloons, transponders on aircraft and ships, and satellites. Billions of bytes of information are then channeled into some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which create weather patterns and the changes likely to affect them. The end result was the creation of astonishingly accurate predictions days in advance.
Now scientists want to take these developments even further; But meteorologists acknowledge that such developments will be limited. The number of variables involved in calculating weather models is overwhelming and will eventually confuse and overwhelm long-range forecasting efforts. But there are ways to overcome some of these uncertainties, they say, and the University of Reading’s new program – Advancing the Frontiers of Earth System Prediction – is designed to tackle them.
“Cities provide a good example,” says ocean and earth observation expert Prof Chris Merchant. “Buildings and roads are not included in current climate models, but they can have a profound impact on weather.
“Think of London and a place like Hyde Park. Sometimes it’s a cool place during a heat wave. At other times the weather may be very hot. It depends on how much moisture is in the ground. Factors like this need to be factored into the data we use to make our forecasts,” added Merchant, who leads a project that is part of the Reading forecasting programme.
He added that understanding cities’ responses to weather can often be much more complex than those in rural areas. “Heavy rain may fall, but current models cannot distinguish between gardens and parks or concrete and roads. “The materials we use to build a city can have an impact, and we need to include variables like this in our models.”
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Another issue relates to data usage, Dance added. “We’re currently only able to use 5% of the data we get from all our sources. We need to find more ways to leverage that data and work at increasingly finer scales. This will definitely give us a more accurate picture of what’s going on.”
This point was supported by the programme’s scientific director, Prof Pier Luigi Vidale. “We’re starting to solve problems at increasingly finer resolutions, not just in the atmosphere but also in the oceans, giving us a much better understanding of how they transfer heat from the equator to the pole and how they affect the paths that storms develop.” wind and rain to our shores. “This will also help with our forecasts.”
He added that the results of the program will be significant on many levels. “We don’t currently fully understand how predictable the real world is. So we try to develop a theoretical understanding of what’s going on and use that to find the limits of predictability. But this isn’t just an intellectual exercise. “If we do this right, we will make a huge, huge difference in people’s lives.”