Weather can be predicted months in advance, says NASA

[Jay GW]

NASA finds way to predict drought, floods

Climate experts at NASA believe they have found a way of forecasting droughts and floods months in advance. New Scientist magazine reports that until now forecasting more than a week ahead had proved impossible because the atmosphere is so unpredictable.

It says NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland has located a series of "hotspots" in the middle of continents where changes in the moisture content in soils may signal droughts or floods to come.

"In these hotspots, soil moisture and precipitation are tightly linked," the magazine quotes NASA's Randal Koster as saying.

The theory runs that water evaporating from soil is a major source of vapour that creates cloud and rain, so the drier the earth, the greater the chance of drought, and vice-versa.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1185608.htm

[Hand Bent Spoon]

Originally posted by Jay GW
so the drier the earth, the greater the chance of drought, and vice-versa.

No ***** kidding!

Your tax dollars at work, folks. And remember, the drier the ground, the greater the chances there's a drought on. At last, employment for all those water dowsers.

:D

[Soapy Sam]

Of course it can. In Scotalnd , it will be raining in months.

[epepke]

If you do have these particular spots, the behavior of which is fairly regular and equilibrium-seeking, then you could use these as boundary conditions for the Navier-Stokes equations and keep them stable over much longer periods of time. The problem is that the N-S equations generally lead to high levels of chaos. If you have something, anything, that you know to be not chaotic, you can use it to do a partial reinitialization.

I'm skeptical that these special spots exist, though, or are so regular as claimed.