Our Weather Predictions

While it's filed under 'Books' in The New Yorker issue July 1, 2019, Hannah Fry's essay is closer to a musing and factual discourse than a work of fiction—'Why Weather Forecasting Keeps Getting Better'.

The writer explains about the equations, and the history and science behind weather forecasts. She opened the article recounting the weather conditions of on June 4 in 1944 that ultimately led to a smooth enough landing on Normandy two days later for D-Day. The writer is also a professor at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that weather forecast, as John Ross makes clear in a book on the subject. Had the Allies gone ahead as planned, the invasion probably would have failed. Had they postponed it until the next interval with favorable moon-and-tide conditions, they would have lost the element of surprise. The German meteorologists had also foreseen the storms, but they’d missed the significance of the brief glimpse of calm. They were so confident that an Allied attack was impossible that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Normandy defenses, decided to take a few days’ leave for his wife’s birthday. He’d even bought her a new pair of shoes in Paris for the occasion. Years later, when Eisenhower was asked why D Day had been a success, he reportedly said, “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.”

Yes, I try to use less plastic, be more environmentally-aware and friendly, et cetera. Beyond daily life, my concern about the weather extends to the cities the faeriefolk and friends live in, or where we're headed on vacation. It rarely goes beyond that. Of course I understand annual weather events in the region, and extreme weather events. I give thanks to living in Singapore where I am sheltered from weather extremities caused by global warming and unusual El Niño patterns.

As much as I roll eyes at the absolutely unfriendly user interface of many apps rolled out by our government agencies, I've downloaded the NEA weather app (named 'myENV') because it's really quite accurate for our small island. Choya is toilet-trained on grass. While she doesn't mind a drizzle and mud and wet grass, I've never been more grateful for Singapore's hot weather and sun, or balmy cloudy with no rain. It means that Choya doesn't have to hold her pee or poop till hours behind her schedule, and I don't have to clean up no accidents.

With more sophisticated algorithms and big data, supercomputers and more streamlined processes help to better forecast the weather. It's a bid to help humans avoid the destruction wrought by hurricanes, typhoons, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat, etc. The entire concept of climate change slaps all scientists in the face. It is the inevitable. When news headlines for every other natural disaster and weather event screams 'first time it has happened in decades' or 'first time in the past 50 years', it doesn't take genius to figure it out. I really don't understand how people could deny it. Perhaps climate changes happen every millennium, and it's no big deal. But if these galactic changes happen in our lifetime, and centuries-old ice sheets melt, then we face catastrophic calamities which will humble humankind.

There will always be a gap between the weather and the forecast. Unfortunately, that gap becomes critical in the case of extreme-weather events. It’s not just during wartime that the forecast can be a matter of life and death. As our planet warms, we’re going to see more hurricanes, more crippling droughts, and more devastating rainstorms than ever before. Even if we manage to achieve the goal set by the Paris Agreement and global warming is kept to under two degrees centigrade, the impact on our weather will be dramatic. Two degrees might not sound like much; it can be the difference between a nice day and a slightly nicer day. But that shift in temperature makes extremes more likely. Our long-range predictions—especially those which anticipate extreme-weather events—rely on an assumption that the future will be similar to the past. Lose that, and we lose the tools that have allowed us to prepare for such eventualities. 

It’s easy to forget that behind each prediction is one of humankind’s greatest accomplishments—something that requires armies of people all over the globe collecting and sharing data, exquisite mathematical modelling, and staggering computer power. The weather doesn’t respect political or geographic boundaries: we’re all living under the same sky. And so weather prediction has been a marvel not only of technology but also of international coöperation. As we enter an era of more storms and greater uncertainty than we’ve ever experienced, let’s hope it stays that way.