Weather prediction
I'm starting to suspect that, over the last 10-15 years or so, I've had an increasingly better idea of what the weather is going to be, but an increasingly bad understanding of why.
Weather forecasting has got better, the visualisations of forecast weather have got better, and I can easily get them on my phone so I see them regularly. But they don't show the stuff that explains the weather.
Today I am doing a long drive, and so looked up forecasts over a wide range of the country. I had an idea of what the weather was likely to be (little to no rain, warm for the season) but had no clear idea why until I happened to see a synoptic pressure chart (you know, the sort with isobars and warm fronts and all that). Suddenly it was really obvious: high pressure to the south in the Bay of Biscay, keeping the UK in a big warm mass of air between a warm front away to the east and a cold front well away to the west of Ireland.
It was, in micro, the great leap forward in understanding the weather that made weather forecasting possible in the first place.
It's not that the info is hard to find: the excellent Met Office publish them regularly online, as you'd expect. I just hadn't been looking. So I think I'm going to make an effort to look up the charts as well as the weather.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/251659.html, where there are
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Weather forecasting has got better, the visualisations of forecast weather have got better, and I can easily get them on my phone so I see them regularly. But they don't show the stuff that explains the weather.
Today I am doing a long drive, and so looked up forecasts over a wide range of the country. I had an idea of what the weather was likely to be (little to no rain, warm for the season) but had no clear idea why until I happened to see a synoptic pressure chart (you know, the sort with isobars and warm fronts and all that). Suddenly it was really obvious: high pressure to the south in the Bay of Biscay, keeping the UK in a big warm mass of air between a warm front away to the east and a cold front well away to the west of Ireland.
It was, in micro, the great leap forward in understanding the weather that made weather forecasting possible in the first place.
It's not that the info is hard to find: the excellent Met Office publish them regularly online, as you'd expect. I just hadn't been looking. So I think I'm going to make an effort to look up the charts as well as the weather.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/251659.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.