3 ms·

While I really want to agree with your sound argument, I have this suspicion that climate change significantly affected forecast skill on Hurricane Otis.

melagonster 2y ago
Climate change: more typhoons in the future. Weather prediction: which path typhoons will follow?
zdragnar 2y ago
The climate didn't change in the time from Otis forming to landing. Weather models look at current conditions and extrapolate what the next set of conditions will be. Another way to look at it is that climate change models reflect what we will experience. Weather models reflect the mechanics of humidity, temperature and air flow- given a current state, what is the next likely state. Climate change doesn't change how those mechanics interact. It only guesses what "current state" will look like in the far future.
- avianlyric 2y ago
  Climate change doesn’t impact the physics of weather, but our understanding of the inputs to a weather system is still very incomplete. Climate change does impact the relative importance of different physical inputs into a weather system, and inherently pushes weather systems away from the most studied and well understood aspects of weather physics. That in turn degrades the accuracy of our models, as it takes time to research and understand whats changed in a weather system, and what previously unimportant inputs have become much more important.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Let's say I live in the hypothetical state of Midwestia. It gets up to 100 degrees F in the summer and down to -40 in the winter months. Over the course of ten years, the average daily temperature goes up by 1 degree F (which is many times faster than reality). That means that there's basically one day in the entire year that doesn't fit within the existing model, or maybe a handful if some other part of the year is cooler than normal. We see more variation between normal years than we expect to see average increase in both the short and medium terms. Our weather models predict no more than two or three weeks into the future. There's literally nothing about climate change that will change how weather systems interact that will occur faster than our weather models will adapt to. Our weather patterns may change drastically, but that's a fundamentally different problem.
    - avianlyric 2y ago
      How quickly do you think our weather models adapt? Our current models are built on top of decades of detailed weather research by tens of thousands of researchers around the world, and has involved the launch of some the largest satellites in space. All to help us try and understand how weather works. Those models don't just "adapt", they're carefully and manually refined over time, slowly incorporating better physical models as they're developed, and better methods of collecting data as it become available. Climate change absolutely changes how weather systems interact faster than our models can adapt, primarily because we can only adapt models to changes after their accuracy degrades, and it becomes possible to start identifying potential weaknesses in the existing approaches. You're example of seasonal temperature changes vs global average temperature increases, vastly underestimates how complicated weather models are, and how much impact changes in global climate systems (like the North Atlantic Current) can drastically impact local weather conditions. Weather models, like all models, will make assumptions about the behaviours of extremely large systems which aren't expected to change very much, or are very hard to measure in real-time. As those large systems change due to climate change, the assumptions made by weather models will grow increasingly incorrect. But that hard part is figuring our which assumption is now incorrect, not always easy to identity exactly what assumptions have been made, or accurately measure the difference between the assumption and reality.

melagonster 2y ago

Climate change: more typhoons in the future. Weather prediction: which path typhoons will follow?

zdragnar 2y ago

The climate didn't change in the time from Otis forming to landing. Weather models look at current conditions and extrapolate what the next set of conditions will be. Another way to look at it is that climate change models reflect what we will experience. Weather models reflect the mechanics of humidity, temperature and air flow- given a current state, what is the next likely state. Climate change doesn't change how those mechanics interact. It only guesses what "current state" will look like in the far future.

avianlyric 2y ago
Climate change doesn’t impact the physics of weather, but our understanding of the inputs to a weather system is still very incomplete. Climate change does impact the relative importance of different physical inputs into a weather system, and inherently pushes weather systems away from the most studied and well understood aspects of weather physics. That in turn degrades the accuracy of our models, as it takes time to research and understand whats changed in a weather system, and what previously unimportant inputs have become much more important.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Let's say I live in the hypothetical state of Midwestia. It gets up to 100 degrees F in the summer and down to -40 in the winter months. Over the course of ten years, the average daily temperature goes up by 1 degree F (which is many times faster than reality). That means that there's basically one day in the entire year that doesn't fit within the existing model, or maybe a handful if some other part of the year is cooler than normal. We see more variation between normal years than we expect to see average increase in both the short and medium terms. Our weather models predict no more than two or three weeks into the future. There's literally nothing about climate change that will change how weather systems interact that will occur faster than our weather models will adapt to. Our weather patterns may change drastically, but that's a fundamentally different problem.
  - avianlyric 2y ago
    How quickly do you think our weather models adapt? Our current models are built on top of decades of detailed weather research by tens of thousands of researchers around the world, and has involved the launch of some the largest satellites in space. All to help us try and understand how weather works. Those models don't just "adapt", they're carefully and manually refined over time, slowly incorporating better physical models as they're developed, and better methods of collecting data as it become available. Climate change absolutely changes how weather systems interact faster than our models can adapt, primarily because we can only adapt models to changes after their accuracy degrades, and it becomes possible to start identifying potential weaknesses in the existing approaches. You're example of seasonal temperature changes vs global average temperature increases, vastly underestimates how complicated weather models are, and how much impact changes in global climate systems (like the North Atlantic Current) can drastically impact local weather conditions. Weather models, like all models, will make assumptions about the behaviours of extremely large systems which aren't expected to change very much, or are very hard to measure in real-time. As those large systems change due to climate change, the assumptions made by weather models will grow increasingly incorrect. But that hard part is figuring our which assumption is now incorrect, not always easy to identity exactly what assumptions have been made, or accurately measure the difference between the assumption and reality.