Technology Corner

Will it be Raining Tomorrow?

It doesn't matter where you are in the world, there is one thing that is guaranteed to affect us all. The weather. Even though our world is bristling with technology and new ingenious ways of controlling our environment, we still cannot even begin to change the weather. That isn't to say that attempts haven't been made to do so. History is resplendent with failed attempts ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. After all everyone has heard of the Witch doctors rain dance. Governments have spent untold millions on weather research and ideas such as dropping various crystalline chemicals into cloud formations and vaporizing them with high powered laser beams. These techniques have cost countries a fortune and only produced negligible results. There is one thing that keeps them going though. The ability to take control of the weather would save any owner of this technology vast amounts of money.

Despite the fact that research still goes on into forcing the elements to do our bidding, more effort is being devoted into reliable weather prediction. It is hard to take in just how much information is now available to the worlds weather forecasters. Over nine thousand outposts exist around the world, all of which send constant streams of data back to base. Alongside this, seven thousand weather ships patrol the areas that are known to create weather fronts. As if this information were not enough to contend with, weather balloons from nearly one thousand stations are released so that the atmosphere can be recorded at heights of up to eighteen miles. To support the data provided from these balloons, hundreds of aircraft make regular reports to ground stations.

Of course, one of the most valuable sources of data is the network of weather satellites that orbit the earth. These provide high resolution pictures of weather patterns from a vantage point that makes it simple to spot weather patterns.Now, you might be wondering what exactly happens to all of this information, once it has been collected. Well, this is where the computers come in. The Meteorological Office in Britain receives over one million weather bulletins a day. This information goes into a powerful mainframe computer. At the moment they use a sixteen processor Cray supercomputer coupled with a four vector processor Cray EL98. This is coupled with an IBM front end that is capable of generating detailed weather forecasts nearly thirty times a day. Impressive, Eh! The computer is used to produce complicated three dimensional projections of the future weather patterns up to thirty six hours in advance. These models allow the forecasters to provide us with the f! orewarning that we need to plan our lives. After all, not many of us would plan a picnic if the forecast is blizzards for the next day.

So why is it that our beloved weather forecasters are so notorious for giving us duff information? There is a popular theory, called the chaos theory. An example of this is that if a butterfly flaps it's wings in one country, then it snows in another. Now maybe this is exaggerating things just a little, but the fact is that there are simply too many things that can affect even the most minor weather patterns. Any one of these changes can result in the predicted weather missing a country altogether. In the meantime, the Met office continues to make their system more and more advanced. I suppose if you are going to get it wrong, you might as well do it in style.

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