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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
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.
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.
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.
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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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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
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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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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?
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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
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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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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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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That's true. Do you think they're going to install GPS trackers on all the butterflies in the world?
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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)
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.
> 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,
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...
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