On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "The difference between weather and climate". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there. How do you go about weather forecasting by yourself? Study the computer models. With experience, you will become familiar with the art - for it takes human interpretation of model output to make the calls. That's what weathermen do. Forecast model output is freely available online and covers many parameters - pressure, temperature, rainfall and a myriad of others. Different models extend to different end-times - the Global Forecasting System (GFS) extends to T+ 384 hours or 16 days, for example. Pressure, or synoptic charts as they are known, portray the positions and subsequent developments of high and low pressure systems over large swathes of the planet. Models are run several times a day. If you examine synoptic charts for the same run of several different models, you will see they all look very similar to start with. But if you then follow them through successive time-points - T+24, 48, 72 hours and so on, there will come a point where you start to notice slight and then larger differences between them. This divergence is where confidence in forecasting falls right away. Forecasting - interpreting the GFS and other model output - is about working with uncertainty in the highly dynamic and to an extent chaotic medium that is our atmosphere. But with experience, you can do your own short term forecasting too, at least for the coming 3-5 days. Longer-term weather forecasting a week or... |