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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?"
Whatever happened to chaos?
Pfft. Chaos is so predictable.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
If a butterfly can cause a rainstorm across the globe, does that mean that Japan will be tracking all creatures big and small for their impact on their 30-year weather forecast? Personally, I don't think anyone wants to know the impact my flatulence has on global warming!
This information would be very useful for investors. If I had previous knowledge about last year's hurricane season I would have bought up the refineries and made a killing.
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).
You may however be able to predict general paterns over a significant period of time. It may be possible to get a pretty good idea of how many typhoons will occur in a given year and how strong they will initially be without knowing their course. Obviously predicting the course and force of typhoons and hurricanes is well ahead of our current capabilities due to knowledge constraints more than computing power.
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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.
Actually, those days are pretty much gone now. With all the latest computational models for weather, as opposed to what was essentially pattern matching before, I find that the weather forecasts on the whole are pretty accurate out to a few days. As for 30 years, I would be more than a little skeptical since you even have to account for things like solar flares and sunspots, or you get small inaccuracies that will grow more massive the further out you get. But, with the new Hello Kitty Supercomputer Center, perhaps they are able to account for this in their computations.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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.
So that's it then, we just stop trying?
I'm rather presuming this model will be constantly revised with new data and new techniques, and that it's predictions will be altered accordingly. Something has to try and do this, then the state of the art can be improved by building on its strengths and working on its weaknesses.
Cheers,
Ian
Everyone is going to talk about how the buttefly effect makes this useless, and that is true for any sort of instantaneous weather. However, there are many things that affect weather cycles that are much more predictable. First is El Nino/La Nina which oscillates every few years. Then there are other oceanic oscillators that operate on a decade or longer cycle. Also there is solar output and human output. Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc. You will be able to plan for these events which will be 30 years down the road, and be able to do something about them - like build buildings capable of withstanding stronger typhoons, or rising sea levels, or what have you.
But never, in no way, will someone be able to tell you if it will rain in 3 weeks, let alone 30 years. I've studied the accuracy of forecasts quite a bit (as an energy analyst), and you can't get much better than climatology once you go 2 weeks out.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
will that thing be able to predict when Godzilla will strike again? I think that Japenese people need that kind of information, IMHO.
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How are they going to choose between the multitude of different climate-altering theories?
Take just for example the world's temperature: are we going to have another Ice Age or a Hot Age? Just choosing one of them changes drastically the results of such experiment.
The data they are using for such experiment is, I believe, reliable (since it is mostly historical data), but the question here is not which dataset to use as input but rather to which function should this input be applied.
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The problem is not computing power, it's the lack of raw data to feed the computer. There aren't enough sensors collecting data to feed the system to make an accurate calculation. Their effort should be spent on increasing the amount of data collected over the globe to have a significant number of datapoints to analyze. That's the key.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Japanese are planning 30 year forecasts?! That's insanity. This "finding the meanings within The Da Vinci Code" bullshit is going WAY too far!
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
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.
The point is likely not to get a 30-year weather prediction system up and running, it's to fund technological research. I'm sure they know damn well that they will never be able to accomplish this 30-year prediction system. I mean, they will probably make a lot of headway on the subject, but basically, the government is just channeling public funds into private companies and universities. Think of it as corporate welfare.
America does this all the time, but its approach is often military-based. Ever heard of Star Wars?
Japan, however, does not have the "luxury" of doing a lot of military research, as their constitution specifically forbids war as a means of solving international disputes. So they come up with equally zany schemes, like this one.
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
check the accuracy of the national weather service forecasts - they tend to be highly accurate (temperature +-5 degrees F, other conditions very high accuracy)
accuracy tends to extend very well out to the 3-day period and acceptably well to the 7-day
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because there is so much more to the weather than just analyzing atmospheric trends. For instance, are they taking into consideration the fact that volcano eruptions can play a large part in changing conditions? Maybe their computer will predict eruptions too. Are they taking in considerations of anomolous behaviors from the sun, such as solar flares, etc. that may influence patterns? Or maybe the effect a metorite has while passing through the atmosphere. Now we're predicting things that are independent of anything originating from Earth itself.
Yeah, must be a crystal ball...
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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?
I certainly hope this doesn't divert resources away from research into giant humanoid robots.
It all depends on your assumptions. Look at Venus. The weather there is dead simple to predict. Heavily overcast, highs in the mid 900's, with poisonous smog in low lying areas through the weekend.
The only reason the Earth's weather seems hard to predict now is that we haven't (yet) experienced a run-away feedback loop. If you posit that we're starting into one, making accurate daily forecasts thirty years out will be much easier than sticking around to see how well you did.
--MarkusQ
Oh, it's not all that useless. Employing a mere pocket calculator, I can often predict the next-morning's contents of my shorts, inputting parameters such as how drunk I am before collapsing on the floor, number of empty cans, and the fine structure constant.
1) The computer will be doing CLIMATE modeling, not weather prediction. That's a different bird. It's like the difference between the average score on a test and your score on the test. Or like describing the flow of heat, but not knowing the underlying collisions that result in the transfer of energy.
2) Higher precision does help you model chaotic systems longer, but... If you run your model until the difference between your prediction and the actual system is larger than a tolerance, the time when this happens is called the horizon time. If you improve your accuracy (let's say your computer system is perfect and errors only occur in getting the initial state right), you only improve the horizon time as the LOG of your improvement. In an age where quadratic methods are just adequate in scientific computing, this is unbearable.
3) Another weather (not climate) prediction option is to use a statistical cohort model. Such a model just takes in data and tries to predict what will happen next based on past trends. It doesn't know any physics, and can take a while to train. This means that the cohort you train in London is useless in Paris. Such "models" often beat physical models in predictive ability, but don't give any insight into why. If you want to fly a plane, they're fine. If you want to do science, see (1) or (2).
Also, this computer is way, way cooler than the one predicting nuclear bomb blasts. But that's, just like, my opinion, man.
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There goes my vacation planning for July 2029.
Maybe they can build it on stuff from the Fifth Generation project.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Considering state of North Korean nuclear program, Japan need only 4-5 year weather forcast computer.
839*929
You won't be able to "predict" anything; weather is driven by a complex set of forces, of which we have a very incomplete understanding. It isn't just a matter of temperature, pressure, moisture content, UV radiation, and infrared radiation, which are the main variables your local forecaster uses to try and predict weather trends. Solar wind, ground cover, cloud formation, cosmic rays, vulcanism, atmospheric electrodynamics: these are extra variables that influence the weather in ways we can't understand. And just to screw up the mixture a bit more, add global warming.
You can build more and more sophisticated models and run them on faster and faster hardware, but in the end, you can't really account for all the possible variables to any degree of accuracy. The more variables you add, each with its own degree of accuracy, the more soupy the predictions become. We know in general terms how systems work, but we have no idea how all these forces interact to create weather. I think the Japanese should stick to trying to determine what actually drives the weather and stay out of the prediction business.
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Chaos limits weather prediction to around a few weeks. A weather prediction is specific: such as clear today, clouding up overnight and raining tomorrow.
Chaos does not limit climate prediction. Chaos means that a tiny difference in starting state will grow to a large difference, however, the starting state does not change the statistics of the future states. A climate prediction is not specific: 33% chance of rain on this date.
The same weather model could be used for both weather prediction and climate prediction. If I did 100 runs of a model starting with 100 slightly different guesses as to the current state of the weather system, the answers would be very similar for about 1 week (that's weather), and if the model is fairly good as modern models are, then the real weather would be fairly close as well. By four weeks all the model runs would be fairly different, and only. If I continued the 100 runs for 30 years of modeled time and collected the statistics, I would have a statistical climate prediction.
Of course, I could also look at the real climate for the past 30 years and also have have the statistics of climate. So why would I use the computer? The answer is that the climate is changing now, and will be changing faster in the future. It would be valuable to have an idea of the regional impacts of this change. Should London be planning for 40C every summer by 2035? Or 45C?
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No, actually we shouldn't. There have been numerous times this year (I can think of no less than 8 separate instances off the top of my head) that the 24 hour forcast was abyssmally wrong. Rain when it was supposed to be sunny and visa versa, snowfall estimates off by 300% or more, temperatures off by 10 degrees or more, and the like. When I listen to the 7am news and it's going to be mostly sunny with a 20% chance of showers in my area during the morning, and it's overcast with a steady drizzle from my home and most of the 50 mile commute to the office - which was just down the street from the news station - I call bullshit on the $X million they spent last year. Cut the "meteorologist" a fucking window in his office, and he could probably tack an extra 10% onto his accuracy rating.
No, we've still got a long way to go. They might be able to predict 10 days to 2 weeks out, but unless you live in SoCal, the accuracy of the latter half are rarely worth the money spent on the RF transmission. (SoCal weather - now there's a racket. 10 months of the year, you could just say "sunny and breezy on the coast, hot in the valley" and be done with it. January and february are a little more tricky, but if you jsut say sunny everyday, you've got a 75% chance of being right anyway, and throw in a "possible showers" and you've got it covered)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And for every sunny day or light spring rain that it predicts, we expect you to take another antidepressant pill.
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Not only do random acts of God throw off prediction, but in order to accurately predict the weather, these scientists are going to have to calculate all the possible inputs less they find a "best fit" model that accurately predicts the first 10 years but deviates from the pattern immediately after. A rather challenging task.
Actually, his site is great. Thanks for commenting on it, I probably wouldn't have bothered to check it out otherwise.
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Let me add..hot and very humid..due mostly to billions of additional sweaty humans.
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One large volcano? It only takes a fart's worth of air to make a change in the Weather patterns way, way in the future. Butterfly effect, anyone?
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According to this website on paleoclimatology, there are some long period weather oscillations such as:
the El Niño -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - 6 to 18 months,
the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - 20 to 30 years
the Pacific-North American Oscillation (PNA) - 3 to 10 years
the The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO - 5 to 10 years
the Artic Oscillation (AO)- 5 to 10 years
the Antartic Oscillation (AAO) - 5 to 10 years
Paleoclimatologists have the records of weather condifions going back thousands of years using information such as tree rings, snow, lava, and seed deposits.
If the researchers could develop a long timescale atmospheric simulator that could replicate this data, then maybe they could predict general trends 30 years into the
future. Although unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanos) make things
bit harder, although they will probably run a large number of possible scenarios
before making any conclusions.
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the simulation will finish in 2036
That's true. Do you think they're going to install GPS trackers on all the butterflies in the world?
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How is a supercomputer going to predict the weather in 30 years?
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. . . when we have Al Gore?
What?
All it takes is one large volcano to erupt and it'll throw off all your predictions.
Don't panic. The 30-Year weather predicting supercomputer predicted this and is designing supercomputer that is powerful enough and specifically built for predicting volcanic activity.
However, it will take 30 years to do so... Much to relief of weather who were protesting that their livelihoods were at stake.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Will predicting the weather in 2036 cause the weather in 2036 to change? Not from a Heisenberg/limits of observation way, but from a Toynbee Convector way. Will the prediction suggest an outcome that we don't like, and push us to make changes?
But of course, we have existing reliable predictions that suggest long-term warming, and we're just squabbling over their accuracy. Maybe instead of looking at this rationally, we should just dress the damn thing up as an oracle and ask it about the meaning of life.
Is it just me or is the title of TFA slightly misleading... Japan Plans 30-Year Supercomputer Forecasts How many others thought they were forecasting the growth of supercomputers of the next 30 years?
Yes you will. Perhaps not the prediction you are expection, but still a prediction. Look at how wether prediction works now. They always talk about likelyhood of something going to happen.
e.g. it will most likely be very warm tomorow in Belgium. The more you go into the future, the larger the margin of error will be. The narrower that error becomes, the better the prediction is.
I know when predictions were done for two days. Now it is done for 5 days with the same about of accurecy. Even 10 days is not that far of.
What they will be doing is extend that accurecy. What people look at now when they see the wetherforecast is that they think that these few days predictions are exact. No, they are not. I believe the acurecy is about 80%.
What they most likely can predict is wether or not it will be a warmer or cooler july and what the trend is. Also most likely they WILL look at what actually drives the weather to get to the predictions.
You must also look at the amout of space you need to cover in a prediction. When I look at Belgian TV, I only see half of Belgium and even that is devided into several regions with different temperatures.
When I look at CNN or BBC world, then I see the whole of Europe and suddenly the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France (up to Paris) have the same temperature.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Whether forecasts try to accurately predict what will happen.
Climate forecasts try to accurately predict the probability that something will happen.
For those of you that don't understand the butterfly effect, it is an ustable element in an overall stable system. Sahara isn't going to become a rain forest just because a butterfly start flapping. So what are climate forecasts for? Obviously not planning your 50th birthday party a few decades in advance.
Examples:
Hydro power: More rain, less rain, more unstable, more stable?
Extreme whether: Zoning, building codes, flood protection, emergency preparations
Wind: Windmill farms
Environmentalism: Pollution, effect on wildlife
Sociopolitical: Changing climate, e.g. if the gulf stream stopped Europe would be a pretty cold place, raising sea levels...
Argiculture: Sun days, crops
I'm sure there's plenty more good reasons to keep track of the climate, but they have nothign to do with weather prediction as such.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My comptuer can do 30-year weather predictions just fine.
You have to understand, though, that weather prediction is different than climate prediction.
You should also realize that my computer is a little slower than the Earth Simulator.
So, contingent on funding, I'll need a little time.
I think I can have one ready in about 35 years.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
If I were asked to predict today's weather where I live in Illinois, I would have predicted "hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms." Now, today's actual weather is a bit cooler than the average (in part, due to recent thunderstorms), but that's usually going to be an uncannily accurate guess (there's a forecasted 80% chance of T-storms tonight, in fact). If you asked me what the local weather would be on July 19, 2036, I would predict "hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms." Whether or not the recorded high temperature on that day is 85 or 105 degrees F and whether there actually are thunderstorms is a matter of chaos- but it's far more likely to be hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms than cold and dry with a chance of snow- even a crude model of the airmasses involved would get this right.
Of course, past performance is not a guarantee of future results, as they say, and July 19 may be smack in the middle of the Great Drought of '36, or a volcano-induced "Year Without Summer." An outstanding meterological computer model might be able to predict the former based on current data, in which case it has perhaps paid for itself- but likely not the latter.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
This sounds incredibly stupid.
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It's all pretty easy to predict after the nuclear war:
year 16: bleak
year 17: bleak
year 18...
Seriously though, more and more scientists and even politicians are waking up to the fact that humankind is constantly changing its environment. Some are saying that the small rises in global temperatures these past couple years may have triggered the increase in hurricane activity and strength we are seeing. Makes sense to me - from a laymans point of view higher temperature = more energy = stronger storm.
As we consume more and more energy, and our ability to shape our environment ever increases, I could see a 30 year simulation as being a good tool for arguing for more green policies, but I don't see it being that good for predicting the next "big one". The intelligent practice would be that if you live in an earthquake prone zone, you build things to withstand earthquakes, not wait until just before you think one's going to strike. Same with hurricanes, tsunamies, etc. If you can't construct something that can withstand it, construct something you can move out of harms way.
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I would say this is where the more intellectual people hang out on the web, yet over half our posts seem to come from people with thier heads shoved so far up thier ass they are approaching thier own mouths. Now granteed shoving your head that far up your own ass is a very impressive feat it doesn't have anything to do with /. or its content. Anyways haven't we been predicting weather for years in advance rather accurately for a very long time. The world almanac comes to mind. I know almanacs are just rough estimates and only for the coming year or so but it seems this could be applied to a superccomputer to get rough estimates for even farther ahead. Of course the data won't be 100% but isn't even the tinies bit of a warning better than nothing? I far one feel better knowing that the gov is at least trying then just saying "Screw it, it's weather and we can't predict it." Besides even if the data is completely wrong, data is data and it will be useful to the piont of at least figuring out what we missed. For those that seem to have forgotten the Wright brothers didn't fly on thier first attempt, remember people science is all trial and error we rarely get it right the first time.
WTF?
OTOH, this sounds to me, like the very predictable scenario of "the uncuttable budget". Having lived in Japan for 3 years I learned that government budgets, once granted, are inviolable for *eternity*. Why do you think they still do MagLev research in spite of every one else in the world having long since abandoned it? The budget for MagLev research is uncuttable. Until that money can be absorbed by another department in some face-saving way, MagLev research will continue.
Probably there's a budget item somewhere that planned for a certain amount of money to be spent on computer-based weather prediction. This budget is now uncuttable. Any bureaucrat who does not spend their full budget is toast - he (most likely it's a 'he') will never be allowed into a position of budgetary authority again.
If you go to the Ministry of Finance without having spent all your budget you run the significant risk of having it cut the next year. This is a "career-limiting move." Since bureaucrats cannot, at least as a practical matter, be fired by the Prime Minister (remember Reagan firing all the air traffic controllers?) these budgets exist for all time.
I hope there's a butterfly in there somewhere.
Tomorrows weather you say?
I had a situation two winters ago here in MA (USA) where I checked the weather.com forecast at 8am (which said sunny all day) and by 11pm an inch of snow had already come down.
That is completely wrong in a 3 hour forecast!
Now that would not have been so bad if I hadn't just driven my rear wheel drive car to work...
...weather forecasts you.
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I don't understand you guys sometimes with all your griping about weather predicitions and TV news and all.
The factors that affect weather predicitions on a small time scale are different from those that affect weather on long time scales. In fact, 0-48 hours is relatively easy to forecast based on extrapolating local conditions and observations. Long-term trends (on the order of magnitude of years) are also relatively easy to forecast (see The Farmer's Almanac, El Nino and Typhoon cycles etc. for evidence...) The big problem is the middle of those two, between 48 hours and 1 year, where the nonlinear aspects of weather have the most sensitivity to initial conditions.
P.S. IANAM, but I read a few articles about Chaos and nonlinear dynamics in college. Since I have a degree in physics, that qualifies me to comment on almost anything.
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Their effort should be spent on increasing the amount of data collected over the globe to have a significant number of datapoints to analyze.
That is certainly a very important key.
A much better understanding water vapor's effect upon weather is also crucial factor.
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40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanos... the dead rising from the grave... human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together...
mass hysteria!
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Quit pissin' on their Cheerios.
Um, yeah...I'm pretty sure your local forecaster just looks at the temperature, pressure, and humidity maps provided by NOAA and says, "gee, that's high pressure and it's warm and wet. There's low pressure over here so I think that's going to move onshore and it'll be 54 and cloudy with a 62.7% chance of rain." Or depending where you actually get your weather, he just goes to NOAA.gov, types in the zip code, then spends the rest of the day preparing his fancy animations of the jet stream for the 7 o'clock news.
Anyway, I seriously doubt the scientists involved in this project have any delusions about telling us when good days are for a picnic in upstate New York in July of 2036. Right now we're at the point of predicting El Nino's and La Nina's based on looking at the long term patterns and comparing those to the ocean temperatures. Compared to the fantastic summary, this project is no doubt more along the lines of those predictions, but carried out further and perhaps made a little more specific. Instead of planning for El Nino weather to be slightly warmer and wetter in continental climate areas (if I remember right) this summer, they might tell us to expect average highs in the American midwest to be 1-2 degrees higher with 10% more rainfall than the average during July of 2010.
Personally, I'm more interested in extending the current 1 week forecasts out to a month or more and increasing the accuracy of short term forecasts. I think it's possible to make reasonable approximations of most of the effects you list. Then again, with articles like this, who knows what they're really up to.
What we need are more doomsday predictions about some future event based on a computer model of something with trillions more variables than are actually included...
Are these the same scientists whose models all conclude that global warming is the result of human activity? That "the debate is over" ?
I'm running SimEarth right now and by my calculations all these storms are caused by an infestation of hippie non-scientists growing coffee in the shade of an organic ginkgo tree which is causing it to release far less oxygen than it normally would, thus saturating the environment with 'greenhouse gasses' DUDE.
i mean a couple of years is good enough for prepare for a disaster... 30 years...looks like the japanese are up to something.
They mean to corner the corn market. "My corns are acting up" is a well know precursor to advancing low pressure systems. Armed with 30 years of upcoming "aching corn" knowledge they will be able to target market their national "Corn Crusher" anti-corn product to populations predisposed to this affliction. e.g. "Marsha Brady (Ames, Iowa), you're corns are going to experience throbbiing corn pain Thursday, Aug 2 due to an encroaching low pressure system. Shouldn't you be crushing your corns with Corn Crusher now? Paypal 32Y to Corn Crusher Industries Akido, Japan and we'll rush out our specialized impliments."
OK fellas, let's take it easy judging the Japanese on their attempts to model the environment. This stuff is already being done all over the place, especially in the US.
I'm a PhD student in Statistics, and I do a lot of work with the Environmental Sciences. While I am no expert on their Climate Models, I do use their results frequently with my statistical models. There are essentially two kinds of models
1. Global Climate Models (GCMs) which are numerical models trying to predict the effects of any potential environmental changes. They're quite useful for going far into the future, but there is no guarantee that they truly reflect what has happened in the past. CCSM is a model I am currently working with right now.
2. Reanalysis Models which are similar to GCMs, but they take the time to compare its results with actual data observed from the past, making sure that it reflects the trends we have already seen. Bonus is accuracy, but I believe the drawback is how far in the future you can go. NCEP and NARCAAP for some examples I've been working with as well.
Again, I am no expert of the actual details of the models, but you're free to read their sites to learn more.
Not bad science, just bad journalism.
Chaos has not gone away, but the objective of the project is not to perdict specific weather events.
Climate is the aggregate statistics of weather. The fact that we have a word "climate" indicates that such statistics are predictable to some extent. The Japanese are planning to try to get as far as is possible in predicting climate. This is not a thirty year weather prediction, and they know it.
The fact that there is a language barrier and probably an incompetent journalist in the mix doesn't invalidate the project.
mt
When I was in college I took a trip with a small class for a question and answer session with Edward Teller at LLNL. He said that one of the most important things in his mind for the scientific community to work on was weather prediction. He believed that being able to accurately forecast the weather months in advance could save countless lives and improve the global economy. He said that this should could be acheivable through improvements in computer simulation, much like the technology they use to simulate hypersonic flows in rocket engines or reactions in a nuclear bomb.
I believe that what he was saying was basically true. If you can establish months in advance that there will be a late freeze, or drought then you can adjust your agricultural time tables to account for it. Also you can protect people from a lot of natural disasters.
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In the above, please transpose "lee" and "weather," because Lord knows I did.
KFG
I think the idea is more along the lines of "It's going to get hotter by 5 degrees C in 30 years, and so giving us 15 typhoons in year 25, and 17 in year 30" etc...
This type of prediction is possible, not the "Japan will get hit with a typhoon on the 15th July, 2015 at 6:37:28am GMT". Global predictions are possible as the small forces that change local weather are not an issue.
By the way, IANAWP (I am not a weatherperson)
> 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.
In other words: What are probable areas where these phenomena occur and what are the most probable paths for those phenomena that are moving.
The reason they take a 30 year period is not that they want to predict the weather 30 years in advance (that's ridiculous), but that they want realistic weather patterns over a 30 year period to match the standard World Meteorological Organization's 30 year period for defining "climate".
E.g., the current "climate" knowledge of the WMO is (the average of) what happened between 1971 and 2000.
Hope this helps,
Brian: (points at the panic room) Peter, what is that?
Peter: Well, I got the idea to build a panic room after I saw that movie The Butterfly Effect. I thought, wow, this is terrible. I wish I could escape to a place where this movie couldn't find me.
(Sorry, it had to be posted, and FWIW I actually like that movie)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If they're doing this correctly, they aren't looking for individual points or even individual curves. They're (hopefully) trying to see the whole butterfly.
Any particular chaotic equation with a stable set of forcing constants will end up with a semi-predictable structure. The problem is that the weather's input forces are changing. Even so, you should be able to solve how those changes distort the overall shape, with sufficient computing power.
OK, here it goes:
Rain followed by Sun
Cooling trends with possible snow in the upper elevations
Warming weather after winter followed by hot summer weather
Godzilla attack
Occasional typhoon
Small chance of a tsunami followed by death and destruction
So either I'm a supercomputer, or this is easier than we thought...
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
...updated daily.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Everybody, point your vacuum cleaners west!
http://outcampaign.org/
I, for one, welcome our self-replicating weather-computer over lords.
Sorry, I cant help myself. I need therapy.
I was about to say "WTF" to this story, then I stopped and thought about it. Clearly they are NOT modeling weather as such, but atmospheric patterns. This isn't even climate modeling; they just want to know what will happen if the sea starts to act in such-n-such a manner at some point. It's the same sort of data mining + modeling that gave us our understanding of the ENSO phenomenon in the southern Pacific. This stuff works.
I took a look at a map of sea currents and noticed that the Japanese Current is a warm water current trending NE from off of China, and no doubt means a lot to the Japanese fishery, coastal weather, and their overall climate. In light of the issue right now with the similar California Current (ie, it's gone and nobody around here knows where it went) the Japanese are maybe wondering "gee, what would happen to us [and our southern neighbors][and the west coast US] if our offshore warm current failed?"
In that context, 30 years is shorting things quite a bit, but I suppose with a puny computational engine like the Earth Simulator 30 years is about all one could expect. The interesting bits are probably 50 years out, but having 30 years to practice tuning your model (and building better engines) is likely a good use of the time.
Maybe they'll be in a good position to tell those of us living in the United States of Denial which coastal region in North America is next in the queue to be smashed into flotsam and washed out to sea. Clearly the Bush administration doesn't care a fig.
Note to self: subscribe to Earth Simulator RSS feed
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
"Whatever happened to chaos?"
Chaos was defeated in FF1, eesh.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Chaos is just a measure of how much relevant information you lack.
With all the relevant information at hand we could predict everything and anything.
--Udo.
Sounds like they are trying to make the Graphic Omniscient Device. Don't they have to build a H.A.R.L.I.E. first?
Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc.
And who is going to predict politics, e.g. the CO2 output of the US over the next 30 years?
I call bullshit. You can't even predict the general climate without taking greenhouse gas emissions into account, let alone specific patterns. So... this is going to depend significantly on e.g. the next elections in the US. Is that outcome included in the simulations? I don't think so.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Really - what? I thought we'd established that being a grammar nazi for the sake of grammar - with no regard to communcation whatsoever - was of no interest to me. Your post highlights my point precisely. You can either have no regard for communication and end up with writing so gramatically compromised as to be unreadable or (on the other extrem) you can have no regard for communication and be such a grammar nazi that the meaning is lost in a mire of self-important editing.
Or, you can actually care about meaning. Sure, some people care about meaning AND have great grammar. Kudos to them. But that's like a bonus. Icing on the cake. The point is to convey meaning. Everythign else is superflous. (yes - even spelling sometimes)
- stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.