What seems to be the most difficult thing for weather forecasters to predict? And why?

Question

What seems to be the most difficult thing for weather forecasters to predict? And why?

Answer 1

The future ; }

Answer 2

weather during semi-stormy weeks of weather. Everything seems predicted wrong then

Answer 3

well i think a hurricane for like the route it is going.

Answer 4

The weather. They are never right.

Answer 5

From the many years of forecasting weather, here is a list of things that would caused nightmares for meteorologists besides the many things that goes bump into the night.

- The development of weak tonadoes.  This is especially true if you think their may be cold air funnels forming that day.  I think the key to improving our forecast for cold air funnels are to look more at the wind shear pattern and terrain enduced surface wind flow that models tend to miss.  

- When to expect evening convective precipitation from terrain induced low level convergence acting on an old, but weak surface boundary.  There is a natural human tendency to forget about old boundaries until suddenly the radar lights up with rapidly developing cells along the old boundary.

- Amount of orographic precipitation ... this is the educated guess as to much extra precipitation will fal out of a storm system as it is lifted over a mountain or hill.  Slopes on the side of hills and mountains can vary greatly within a short distance.

-The development of any outflow surface boundaries.  A thunderstorm does not aways produced a ourflow boundary and no computer forecast models has been able to forecast one before its developement.

-Wind forecast for an elevated frontal system.  This is a major problem in areas where terrain varies greatly.

-Snow levels for a mid level evaporative cooling event.  We tend to concentrate too much on surface observations on this type of  pattern.

- Any cut-off upper low..computer models as well as experienced forecasters tend to be too progressive or too fast in moving these types of system

-Weaker hurricanes are harder to forecast than the stronger ones.  If you look back over the past 15-20 years, forecaster can usually nailed those CAT 4 and CAT 5 system ... but struggle with the CAT 1 and 2 systems. A weaker system has more influence from smaller scaled enviromental factors.  

-Long range forecast past three days has always been difficult to forecast.  In this case, I think we have gotten away from the better old school techniques of using the long-wave pattern or the 5-wave graphics and put too much trust on the modern use of the spegetti charts. I still think the limit is 3 to 5 days in the wet season and 5 to 7 days in the dry season.

- Timing of when a cell will become devient from the mean flow.  In these cases, you just have to wait until you see it starting to change directions.

- The timing of the development of delta induced surface wind flow.  This has always caused major headaches mainly because there are so many factors invilved in its development.

- The timing and placement of any microburst over a specific location before any cell has been detected by radar, satellite, or spotter.  No solutions that I can think of other than some clues with a nearby sounding.

-The timing of the surface winds decoupling when you expect the mid level winds to be strong all night.  This is especially when winds aloft are very gusty in an area of general subsidence with a clear night ahead.

- Fire weather forecast for wind shift timing and relative humidity.  With so many fire fighters lives that may depend on this forecast, it can be a very tough forecast to make as a minor mistake may result in flames over running the fire fighters.

These are all difficult, so it is hard to pick just one.

That is just some examples I can think of off the top of my head.

Answer 6

Duh, the weather!  Because they are not Mother Nature!!

Answer 7

Hey Hey, guys easy with the weather guesser bashing! :)

As a meterologist I think that snow is the hardest thing to forecast, but that is a personal opinion.

Most of my counterparts would argue that hurricanes are the most difficult storms to forecast, due to their movement, strength and speed. All variables must be dead on, and require a great amount of intelligence to predict accurately.

Luckily, all the hurricanes I've had to deal with were covered by the NHC in Miami, FL.

For all of you who like to complain about us being wrong, imagine the whole world in your mind. Imagine all of the water in the atmosphere,the physics that are being activated, the energy being transfered here and there and all variables that go into a forecast and then apply that to an area the size of a city. Lets see how you do!

Peace

Answer 8

Short and sweet:

Generally, the smaller the weather phenomenon, the harder it is to forecast.  Weather models have a fairly coarse grid spacing (resolution) compared to certain things that can cause significant weather.  Say a model has 8 km resolution, it means it can only resolve things that are about 16 or more km across.  Obviously, tornadoes are much smaller than that.  Even thunderstorm supercells are smaller than that.  Here on the west coast, we get something called the "Catalina Eddy" that's responsible for keeping L.A. under a dense cloud cover even during the day in the summer.  This is another small feature, and the Global Forecast models can't forecast it.  

So think of anything that is in a small scale, and you can be sure that models can't deal with them, and so weather forecasters are very limited in what they can do to forecast such things.