IBM Wants To Predict The Weather 300 Years From Now
from the bundle-up dept
IBM and the University of California at Irvine are working on a supercomputer that can predict the planet’s climate changes up to 300 years in the future. They claim it’s a revolutionary breakthrough in computing, but neglect to mention that part of the reason they’re probably working on it is to surpass the power of a Japanese weather predicting computer that made headlines a year and a half ago. I’m sure that it won’t be all that long until another supercomputer comes along and beats this one as well.
Comments on “IBM Wants To Predict The Weather 300 Years From Now”
Prediction?
Who’s going to know if they are right? who’s going to care?
How about they just tell me if it’s going to rain tomorrow.
GIGO
The Weather Channel can’t guess right within five degrees of what the high or low will be on any given day, so how does anyone expect to predict 300 years worth of weather. 30 years ago the weather models predicted an ice age. Ten years ago it was global warming. Wonder what they’ll come up with?
Wouldn't it be cool if
The earth’s rotation slowed down somehow? Stay up later, wake up later.
Just remember
Climate prediction is not the same as weather prediction.
The former looks at trends, averages, etc. Very useful for deciding which month of the year is safest to lay concrete, or to predict long-term effects of climate on crop growth. The latter tries to indicate the temperature, whether it’ll actually rain, and how strong the wind will be. Not the same thing.
Note also that if the presenters of weather forecasts were entirely honest, they’d tell you how confident they are of their predictions. Most 1-day predictions come with about a 90% confidence. Go out to 3 days, and it’s about 30%. Go out to the ridiculous 10 days that some idiots release to the public, and it’s about 5%.
Re: Just remember
I get the feeling that you wouldn’t approve of my planning my coming August vacation using The Farmer’s Almanac?
Without a computer...
I can predict the weather extremely far into the future… Very very hot, as the sun envelopes the earth on its way to becoming a white dwarf… 🙂