The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum. 

3/5 rating. 181 pages.

Book #28 of 2019. Read July 18, 2023.

This book is all about the system that we rely on to get information about the weather and forecasts.

Vermont has been hammered by rain and floods over the last few weeks – experiencing some of the worst flooding in at least decades. I figured this would be a good time to read about the system we rely so heavily upon in order to get information about weather. This book was definitely interesting as it explained the history of weather gathering, tying together that info, and finally beginning to make predictions about what we could expect to come. I remember being in Calculus II in college and being told about the impossibility of accurate weather forecasts. As Andrew explains:

“If you could solve for tomorrow’s weather, you could prove yourself right when tomorrow’s weather actually came. But he couldn’t solve for tomorrow’s weather. There was the persnickety fact that Bjerknes’s equations were functionally unsolvable. Six out of seven were partial differential equations that as Bjerknes himself admitted, ‘far exceed[ed] the means of today’s mathematical analysis.’”

This hints at the difficulty involved, but in case that was still in doubt:

“As a rocket scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory put it to me when I explained my broader project, landing a spacecraft on Mars requires dealing with hundreds of mathematical variables; making a global atmospheric model required hundreds of thousands. ‘That’s complicated!’ he said.”

But as Andrew talks about, as weather forecasts become more accurate, we have started relying on them more and more. The difficulty, and part of the beauty, of this system is that it relies on us all working together. It requires the raw data collection of instruments all around the world, the patching together of all that data, and finally the analysis of what is likely to happen going forward in order to give us an expectation of the future.

“‘Forecasts possess no intrinsic value,’ Murphy wrote. ‘They acquire value through their ability to influence the decisions made by users of the forecasts.’”

(P.S. loving my “new” kindle!!)

Quotes:

“Bjerknes whittled the physics of the atmosphere down to seven equations, which required observations consisting of seven variables: density, pressure, temperature, humidity and wind velocity (as a vector, so it counted as three).”

“But the weather is special in that its predictions need not be constrained to the present or the near future. A new way of calculating the weather can be tested on the entire history of weather data. If a weather prediction is wrong – which it always is a little – scientists can try again a different way, tweaking aspects of their equations like an optometrist does a phoropter.”

“There was no excising the genes of war from the DNA of weather satellites. We put things in space for many reasons, but we learned to put things in space for only one.”

“The weather machine has to be a global system, and it won’t work any other way. At its heart is an equilibrium between the things nations do for themselves and the things they contribute to systems that supersede their borders.”

 #weather #books #reading

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