The mainstay of casual conversation – the unexpected state of the weather – is under existential threat. Scientists plan to make forecasts so accurate that they will be able to determine weather patterns a month into the future.
Barbecue woes and Wimbledon washouts could take a serious hit – thanks to the new 15-year research program being run by Reading University, in partnership with the Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The goal is to transform our ability to unravel the small influences that determine weather patterns and expose the limits of predictability in the real world.
“A big aim of our work is to be able to say what the weather will be like a month ahead,” said Prof Rowan Sutton, research dean for the environment at Reading – although he stressed that it would not be possible to predict precisely not. , a month in advance whether a particular day would be sunny or rainy.
“However, we hope to be able to say that we are likely to experience a period of very wet and windy weather – or enjoy sunny weather – four weeks before a given date,” he added. “It won’t ensure that you have sunshine for your wedding day, but it will undoubtedly have many useful applications – for example for farmers or energy companies.”
Accurate advance weather forecasts will become increasingly important as the planet warms and more and more extreme weather events occur, scientists say. Worsening storms and droughts will mean that highlighting their arrival time will be increasingly important to save lives and property.
Meteorologists can currently make forecasts more than a week ahead with reasonable accuracy. It saves the UK billions of pounds a year by providing warnings of upcoming storms, floods, droughts and the potential for airline flight disruption, while also helping energy companies estimate how meteorological conditions will affect power generation.
This is a big improvement on the 1970s, when forecasts were only accurate a day or two ahead. “As a rule, we have improved the predictability of our weather forecasts by a day every decade since the middle of the last century,” said Prof Sarah Dance, an expert in data assimilation at Reading’s Department of Meteorology.
To achieve this accuracy, massive streams of data are collected from automated weather stations that dot the countryside, deep-water buoys that warn of incoming Atlantic storms, weather balloons, transponders on planes and ships, and satellites. Billions of bytes of information are then channeled into some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which create models of weather patterns and the changes likely to affect them. The end result was the creation of forecasts of astonishing accuracy for many days ahead.
Now scientists want to push these developments further – although meteorologists admit there will be limits to such improvements. The number of variables involved in calculating weather patterns is large, and will eventually combine and overwhelm efforts at long-term forecasting. However, there are ways to overcome some of these uncertainties, they say, and the new Reading University program – titled Advancing the Frontiers of Earth System Prediction – is designed to tackle them.
“Cities provide a good example,” says Prof Chris Merchant, an expert in ocean and earth observation. “Buildings and roads are not included in current climate models, yet they can have a major influence on the weather.
“Consider London and a place like Hyde Park. Sometimes it’s a cool place during a heat wave. Other times it can be very hot. It depends on how much moisture there is in the soil. Factors like this need to be included in the data we use to make our predictions,” added Merchant, leader of a project that is part of the Reading Prediction Programme.
Understanding cities’ responses to weather can often be much more complex than those of the countryside, he added. “You can get heavy rain, but current models cannot distinguish between gardens and parks or concrete and roads. The things we use to build a city can have an impact and we need to include variables like this in our models.”
Another issue concerns the use of data, Dance added. “At the moment we can only use about 5% of the data we get from all our sources. We need to find more ways to make use of that data and work at finer and finer scales. It will certainly give us a more accurate picture of what is going on.”
This point was supported by Prof Pier Luigi Vidale, the programme’s science director. “We’re starting to resolve things at finer and finer resolutions, not only in the atmosphere but in the oceans, which gives us a much better understanding of how they transport heat from the equator to the poles and the ways in which storms develop and bring , affects. winds and rain to our coast. This will also help our forecasts.”
The results of the program will be important on many levels, he added. “Right now, we don’t 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 out what the limits to predictability are. But this is not just an intellectual exercise. If we get it right, we’re going to make a huge, huge difference to people’s lives.”
