HOW DO METEOROLOGISTS FORECAST THE WEATHER?

          As everyone knows, predicting the weather can often be difficult. Professional weather forecasters, called meteorologists, use information collected by weather stations on land, at sea and on satellites in space. Rainfall, sunshine and wind speed can all be measured fairly easily, but they only tell us what the weather is like now. A better gauge of future weather is to study air pressure and cloud formation. Today’s meteorologists use computers to help make sense of all the information received and to predict, based on past events, the weather of the future.

          ‘Observations’ are the readings of the weather that we take—not only quantities like air pressure, temperature and rainfall at the surface, but measurements in the upper atmosphere from weather balloons and aircraft, and also data from weather radars and satellites. Together, these observations of many different elements that make up the weather paint a picture of how it has been recently, and how it is right now. This information is critical—to forecast the weather into the future, we need to know where to start from!

          Computer Weather models, or technically, ‘numerical weather prediction’ models, are the main tools we use to forecast the weather. In a nutshell, they take all of the mathematical equations that explain the physics of the atmosphere and calculate them at billions of points within the atmosphere around the Earth. The weather models require enormous computing power to complete their calculations in a reasonable amount of time, meaning they use some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—our supercomputer, for example, can handle more than 1600 trillion calculations per second! The models take the past and current weather observations of the atmosphere and ocean as the starting point, and plug them into the mathematical equations that calculate the weather into the future.

          Meteorologists are able to predict the changes in weather patterns by using several different tools. They use these tools to measure atmospheric conditions that occurred in the past and present, and they apply this information to create educated guesses about the future weather. Always remember that a weather forecast is an educated guess – meteorologists (and mankind, in general) cannot control the weather. The best we can do is observe past and present atmospheric patterns and data, and apply this information to what we think will happen in the future. Meteorologists use the scientific method on a daily – and even hourly – basis!

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