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Japan Plans 30-Year Supercomputer Forecasts
BaltikaTroika writes "According to a ministry representative, 'Japan is planning ultra long-range 30-year weather forecasts that will predict typhoons, storms, blizzards, droughts and other inclement weather.' Maybe they should tell their secret to my local weatherman, who usually can't even get tomorrow's weather right. Whatever happened to chaos?"
your weatherperson is trying to be fairly specific. I admit to not reading the article, but I do know a little about computer simulation, and I would guess they are looking at larger trends in temperature and storm patterns. Not trying to accurately predict daily temperatures and precipitation like your weatherman (who interprets/puts a local spin on data (s)he gets from noaa).
Isn't the Farmers Almanac similar to this, only with a shorter forcast range? And it is more accurate than random guessing. Let's see if this supercomputer can beat it.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
If there is one thing the Japanese know how to do, it is gather information. And with a few thousand years of weather logs to work from, they became quite handy at accurate short range weather prediction years ago, with nothing more than an abacus.
What we have here is the 'bullet-train syndrome' at work, where they don't just move from weeks to months, or months to years...they jump to decades. Hubris aside, this is very typical of the Japanese culture and a natural 'next step', actually.
Early warning could enable the government to allocate money and resources to potential disaster areas before disaster strikes.
... the supercomputer says we're going to get hit with a Tsunami in 2024, oh please oh please government start giving us money now so we can squander it early!
Now this would be total chaos. WTF are they thinking? Oh
The difference between predicting tomorrow's weather and the wether over the next 30 years is precision. For tomorrow's weather, you want specifics about whether it is going to rain within a pretty narrow window. If these folks are only aiming for general trends over the next 30 years (e.g. "we expect a 3-5 dry spell starting in about 2 years", "we predict 30% fewer large hurricanes in the late 2010's compared with the early 2010's" etc) it's a different issue. Nobody is claiming they will be able to say "On August 1 2023 Miami will be hit by a category 5 hurricane" or "Osaka will get x.xx inches of rain in February 2011".
Even if I can't predict what will happen on the next pull of the slot machine, I can still predict that if I play for 12 hours straight I'm pretty much going to end up broke.
Who can't see that climate and weather are two different things.
All it takes is one large volcano to erupt and it'll throw off all your predictions. There are plenty of factors involved with the weather outside of normal weather-type things.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The results will help establish predictable routes for typhoons and identify areas that are recurring targets for heavy rains, abundant snow, high waves, heavy winds, scorching heat or crop-threatening droughts.
This seems very reasonable. They're not trying to predict the weather on the third Tuesday in March, 2025, they're trying to establish long-term trends.Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
"...you can't get much better than climatology once you go 2 weeks out."
I heard a great quote somewhere along the line: "It isn't decided that far in advance".
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I'm guessing by the statement "The machine tracks global sea temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the next centuries." that they are already doing this.
Because that's what forcasting is all about. We don't know enough of the variables so we have to have to make best estimates on a chaotic system.
Any predictive computer will ultimately fail, because you can't compress the universe into a computer smaller than that universe, and we are unable to figure out every equation that's being calculated anyway. You might get data that's "good enough" for 30 years, but the deviation will only increase with time. That's why weather predictions are generally only good 3 or 4 days in advance (of course this also depends on where you live, there's some places I've been to where the weather is pretty much a sure thing). Their simplified models of the Earth can estimate about when it'll rain, and about how much, but it's not exact, and any ignored variable could throw the whole thing out of whack. I give them credit for trying though, and maybe we'll see some technological jump out of it.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Even the article got it wrong, it starts with " Japan is planning ultra long-range 30-year weather forecasts", and later states "Japan's science ministry hopes to calculate long-term patterns in the interaction of atmospheric pressure, air temperatures, ocean currents and sea temperatures", i.e. climate modelling.
This is nothing new either. Earth Simulator has been used for these things for many years, and was the worlds fastest supercomputer for several years.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Chaotic processes can be predicted with great accuracy for short time into the future, but can't be predicted a long time into the future.
That entirely depends upon the process in question and the selection of initial variables.
Sensitivity to initial variables and deviation from the expected path are what makes chaotic functions fun.
For some equations and parameters the expected path can be estimated with great precision, however move a fraction to the left and they will spin wildly out of control.
Just look at 2 adjacent points in the mandelbrot set.
liqbase