 |
 |
Accurate Temperature Prediction
Name: Chris
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Ok, so everyone agrees the weatherman is not
always right! They do seem right on with determining what the
temperature will be tomorrow. What is it that enables the
accuracy with this prediction to be so high?
Replies:
There is a long line of people who would challenge your
confidence in the weatherman's ability to accurately predict
tomorrow's temperature. But that aside, meteorologists have models
for taking input from the surroundings often hundreds of miles away
from the local site. The atmospheric input are variables such as
barometric pressure, wind speed, temperature at the remote
locations, humidity, and so on (there are more input variables than
the ones I listed here). In addition, the atmospheric conditions,
including temperature, are easier to predict in some locations than
in others. For example, being near an ocean or major lake, like one
of the Great Lakes in the U.S. tends to minimize temperature
changes. At the other extreme, there are locations like Kansas and
Nebraska that are very flat so that atmospheric air can move
rapidly-- unimpeded by mountains, hills, forests, etc. In these
locations it is much more difficult to predict tomorrow's
temperature accurately.
The various input data are fed into the weather/climate model
and one of the outputs is a prediction of the temperature. These
are usually very sophisticated weather models that work fairly
well. Although sometimes it is said, "Look out the window!" and you
can make a reasonable estimate of tomorrows temperature.
Vince Calder
Click here to return to the Weather Archives
| |
Update: June 2012
|
|
