| This website earns a
commission from online advertising. The advertising model used
is called affiliate marketing and enables websites to earn money
for promoting products or services. Weather forecasting is the
application of science and technology to predict the conditions
of the atmosphere for a given location and time. People have
attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia and
formally since the 19th century. Weather forecasts are made by
collecting quantitative data about the current state of the
atmosphere at a given place and using meteorology to project how
the atmosphere will change.
Once calculated by hand based mainly upon changes in barometric
pressure, current weather conditions, and sky condition or cloud
cover, weather forecasting now relies on computer-based models
that take many atmospheric factors into account. Human input is
still required to pick the best possible forecast model to base
the forecast upon, which involves pattern recognition skills,
teleconnections, knowledge of model performance, and knowledge
of model biases. The inaccuracy of forecasting is due to the
chaotic nature of the atmosphere, the massive computational
power required to solve the equations that describe the
atmosphere, the error involved in measuring the initial
conditions, and an incomplete understanding of atmospheric
processes. Hence, forecasts become less accurate as the
difference between current time and the time for which the
forecast is being made (the range of the forecast) increases.
The use of ensembles and model consensus help narrow the error
and pick the most likely outcome.
There are a variety of end uses to weather forecasts. Weather
warnings are important forecasts because they are used to
protect life and property. Forecasts based on temperature and
precipitation are important to agriculture, and therefore to
traders within commodity markets. Temperature forecasts are used
by utility companies to estimate demand over coming days. On an
everyday basis, people use weather forecasts to determine what
to wear on a given day. Since outdoor activities are severely
curtailed by heavy rain, snow and wind chill, forecasts can be
used to plan activities around these events, and to plan ahead
and survive them. In 2009, the US spent $5.1 billion on weather
forecasting |
