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?"

Comments

Chaos?

[TheAngryMob]

Whatever happened to chaos?

Pfft. Chaos is so predictable.

Re:Chaos?

[neonprimetime]

Early warning could enable the government to allocate money and resources to potential disaster areas before disaster strikes.

Now this would be total chaos. WTF are they thinking? Oh ... 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!

Forecasts okay now

[Foobar of Borg]

Maybe they should tell their secret to my local weatherman, who usually can't even get tomorrow's weather right.

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.

Re:Forecasts okay now

[Jerf]

It might depend where you are.

In Michigan, sure, sometimes they get a week right.

On the other hand, sometimes they're so far off you can barely recognize the week. What seems to happen is a lot of storms stall that they don't expect, or they expect something to stall and it doesn't.

Probably the funniest was the recent "hurricane" over Michigan (about a month ago), which even made Fark. This storm complex stalled for a week and change, and basically every day of the week, the prediction was that it would move away by tomorrow.

Michigan seems to be at a meeting point for storm systems coming from the West, cold air coming from Canada, and wet, moist air coming from the Gulf. Predicting which will "win" for any given day seems to give the models fits. For example, the worst winter storms for us are when the cold Canadian air meets the warm, moist Gulf air, but predicting exactly where they will meet and drop all the snow seems to have an error bar of several hundred miles (i.e., for a prediction of hitting Lansing, smack dab in the middle of the lower peninsula, you're looking at it actually hitting anywhere from mid-Ohio to the top of the UP.) I've noticed that for predicting precipitation, you're almost better off just watching a couple of hours of the radar loop and making your own prediction.

Re:Forecasts okay now

[NichG]

This gives me an idea for an interesting analysis. I wonder if you take all the weather predictions for the last 20 years or so and compare with the actual weather, if you'd see any patterns when you plot a map of the error as a function of location (and perhaps isolate it to the weather during a particular time of year). If there are particular locations which end up being tipping points, then that tells you something about the dynamics and where you need the highest resolution when you're building your models.

Probably someone has already done this though.

RTFA, submitter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

They're not trying to forecast weather 30 years in the future, they're just looking for statistical trends in locations where hurricanes and such are more likely to occur, based on predictions of the overall global climate. Things like "there are probably going to be 20-40% more typhoons off the east coast of Japan in 10 years", not "watch out, Tokyo is going to be hit by a tsunami on August 12, 2032".

Re:Already exists!

[Cycloid Torus]

Not only that, it is available as a download!

http://www.farmersalmanac.com/weather/weather.html

Actually Useful

[Ignignot]

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.

Re:Actually Useful

[lawpoop]

"...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".

Re:Actually Useful

[Ignignot]

If you are referring to forecasts in the United States, there are several different forecasts provided by the government which provide the baseline to basically everything you see on TV or hear on the radio or whatever. There is a short term forecast called the AVN/NAV which is intended to aircraft, so they will know how to schedule flights. This has a forecast which provides information on 3 hour intervals and is updated many times a day. Next there is the MRF, which goes out 12 days or so (it has been a few years since I looked at it directly) and is a daily forecast, updated several times a day. It is intended for general use and is basically what you see every day. There are some commercial vendors that put their own spin on things, and plenty of specialized forecasts for things like hurricanes, etc. However, these two are the most important forecasts for anyone in the United States, and have been around since the 90's at least. What you may be seeing is a "keeping up with the Joneses" approach to TV weather forecasting. If one station has 9 days, and the other has 8, which one are you going to watch? While that last day may have no accuracy whatsoever, people would still tend to watch one over the other I think.

Yes another person

[sholden]

Who can't see that climate and weather are two different things.

Re:Useless indeed

[mrxak]

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.

It all depends on your assumptions

[MarkusQ]

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

A Few Things

[Hoplite3]

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.

Re:Useless indeed

[Billosaur]

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.

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.

Long period weather oscillations...

[mikael]

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.

Re:Useless indeed

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

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