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For most of my life, I've heard weather forecasts in the news be described as infamously unreliable. Has there been any serious advance in this field? Is the unreliability of weather forecasts just another of those too-popular memes about things we love to hate?
Disclaimer: I am not a meteorologist, but a friend of mine is and I had discussed this with him some time ago. Paraphrasing from memory, I might make mistakes.
Only in recent decade or two we got enough computational power to run huge weather models (such as Aladin) comfortably, with live updating on incoming data. However, the model is only as good as the input data - if the meteorological weather stations are positioned every few kilometers, the prediction is extremely good, but if they are more sparse, the errors increase. The complexity of terrain plays... (read more)