THE FUTURE OF FORECASTING
They show that the accuracy of a five-day forecast nowadays is comparable to that of a three-day forecast about 20 years ago, and that each decade, we gain about a day’s worth of skill. Essentially, today’s three-day forecasts are as precise as the two-day forecast of ten years ago.
But is this skill increase likely to continue into the future? This partly depends on what progress we can make with supercomputer technology. Faster supercomputers mean that we can run our models at higher resolution and represent even more atmospheric processes, in theory leading to further improvement of forecast skill.
According to Moore’s Law, our computing power has been doubling every two years since the 1970s. However, this has been slowing down recently, so other approaches may be needed to make future progress, such as increasing the computational efficiency of our models.
So will we ever be able to predict the weather with 100 percent accuracy? In short, no. There are 2×10⁴⁴ (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) molecules in the atmosphere in random motion – trying to represent them all would be unfathomable. The chaotic nature of weather means that as long as we have to make assumptions about processes in the atmosphere, there is always the potential for a model to develop errors.
Progress in weather modeling may improve these statistical representations and allow us to make more realistic assumptions, and faster supercomputers may allow us to add more detail or resolution to our weather models but, at the heart of the forecast is a model that will always require some assumptions.
However, as long as there is research into improving these assumptions, the future of weather forecasting looks bright. How close we can get to the perfect forecast, however, remains to be seen.
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