Today, you can pull out your phone and know the weather a week in advance.
That's pretty neat. And it's all because weather forecasting — specifically, the supercomputer-driven modelling which crunches huge amounts of data and predicts future outcomes — has gotten really good. A six-day weather forecast today is as good as a two-day forecast was in the 1970s.
Andrew Blum wanted to know how those forecasts got made, and his curiosity led him to research and write The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast. He says he first got the idea for the book when he saw a forecast for Hurricane Sandy eight days in advance of its arrival.
"That length of that time just seemed astonishing to me," Blum says. "And it also seemed crazy to me that it wasn't the expert hurricane forecasters, you know, sort of putting the pieces together in their minds — it was really the outputs of these computer models that they are responding to."
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