Climate modelers have zero skill six weeks out, but they can predict the climate one hundred years from now within a few tenths of a degree.
“In California, a drought turned to floods. Forecasters didn’t see it coming.”
In California, a drought turned to floods. Forecasters didn’t see it coming.
Joe Bastardi saw it coming. But then he is an actual meteorologist that only uses the models as one input among many in his analysis. Also, Joe mentioned it coming but said he really does not concentrate on west coast weather forecasting that much because that is not where Weatherbell’s clients are.
A decade or so ago California voters approved billions of dollars for new reservoirs. Not one has been built as of yet. They’d rather sit around and moan about man-made “climate change” and pass stupid mandates like EVs.
I don’t know if this is all time record or not. When I first moved to California, I thought this was the standard thing. That was 1978. Even if it is an all time record, it doesn’t mean anything, because we have not had really accurate records for that long. All time record rainfall is not man-made. All-time record flooding can be man induced through pavement and buildings which absorb no water. In any case, if they didn’t see it coming, it is because their model is horrible. I didn’t see it coming now, but I knew it would come someday, because weather is cyclic, not linear.
There is no science in it, it’s all politics.
A three year drought, and it’s the worst drought in 1200 years? A, “Western Megadrought”? What percentage of the continental US did it cover?
Compared to Australia’s “Federation Drought”, which lasted 8 years from 1985 to 1903 and covered at least two thirds of the continent, this is nothing.
Compared to the “Dust Bowl” years in the US in the 1930’s, for length of time and area covered,this is nothing.
The only difference between Australia, the US “Dust Bowl”, and now is, they didn’t have climate change back then. Nothing to blame it on but, the weather.
Actually, to some degree the Dust Bowl could be blamed on foolish farming practices which were promoted by greedy politicians and land developers and bankers. The farming practices of eastern areas that received over 40 inches of rain a year were used on western lands that received less than 20. Believe it or not, the farmers were told such behavior would increase the amount of rain that fell on their lands from less than 20 to more than 40. There was some odd motto such as, “Rain follows settlements”. In essence, rather than adapting to the land they thought they could make the land adapt to them. The policy sort of worked as the lands went through a wet cycle in the 1920’s, but was a complete disaster when the lands went through a dry cycle in the 1930’s.
In the early 1980’s I knew a Kansas farmer who grew up during the Dust Bowl, and he made it quite clear the situation, especially the heat, was far more extreme than recent events. Temperatures over 110 degrees were fairly common for several summers.
To some degree the Dust Bowl was “manmade”, due to ignorant plowing practices on landscapes commonly swept by high winds, but there have always been droughts in the west, and some must have been quite severe. Aerial photographs indicate the traces of great, Sahara-sized dunes that formed during droughts of the past. Furthermore, a more recent drought so impressed the mapmakers of the mid 1800’s that they charted the area between the Mississippi River and California as “The Great American Desert”.
During the overcrowding days of the Baby Boom in the 1950’s my first-grade class got put in an old classroom which had an antiquated map on one wall, and I recall studying “The Great American Desert” when bored by “Dick and Jane”.
Current conventional weather forecasting is, according to Piers Corbyn, British astro-physicist and long-range forecaster, only accurate for about three days ahead. And why? Because it attempts to predict the behaviour of two chaotic systems; the atmosphere and the oceans. That can’t be done! Piers’ Solar/Lunar technique makes predictions based on hind-casting from past behaviour of the Sun and the Moon. I strongly recommend looking at his blog; climateaction.com. Piers is, of course, damned by the usual suspects; The Guardian, the Twitterati and every other leftist ratbag under the Sun.
Economic demand for accurate 10-day forecast on cell phone aps will drive improvement. So sad there is no mass market feedback for decadal models.
It cannot really be improved. Even if you could get the grid size down to scales of meters or millimeters – sensitive dependence on initial conditions prevails. A submicroscopic eddy current can tip the balance of a condition on an edge and it can roll into so many potential phase spaces that every timestep forward might as well be a loose guess. Every subsequent timestep amplifies the possible error in the system and it can drift dramatically.
Its why you cannot predict the outcome of a roulette spin even if you know the initial trajectory of the ball and all the physics of the room down to the micron. Sub-micron divergences from model accumulate with each timestep. The prediction will diverge from the model long before the system comes to rest.
Weather forecasting will always never be accurate past about 3 days.
‘Forecasters didn’t see it coming.’
That’s okay. Few people act on long range forecasts.
10 to 20 inches of rain, but the drought isn’t over.
The clairevoyant’s convention was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Says it all.