The limits of predictability

Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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001 | 2025-06-12

How far into the future can we actually predict the weather? Typically, this question is rhetorical, a slight (or smite⚡) against meteorologists everywhere after someone’s wedding gets rained out. But in this inaugural episode of Weathering, we’re asking in earnest—what is the horizon for accurate weather forecasts?

Here, we look at a paper from the University of Washington (link below) that suggests the limit might be more than double the long-held belief of fourteen days. Thus, too, challenging the foundational theory of chaos—“the butterfly effect”—that has informed how we think and forecast weather since it was coined in the 1970s. We examine the methods that the researchers use and engage in some armchair philosophy: What does chaos mean if our foundational example of chaos—weather—is actually predictable? Is there a difference between chaos and predictability? And how might knowing next month’s weather change our relationship to the environment and weather itself?

We can’t promise you answers, we didn’t even articulate the questions that well, but we can promise to add to your never-ending TBR.

Featured paper

Testing the Limit of Atmospheric Predictability With a Machine Learning Weather Model
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20238

Further reading

• Science and Method by Henri Poincaré
  Chaos theory before it was chaos theory.

• Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson
  The 1900 Galveston hurricane through the eyes of meteorologist Isaac Cline, revealing the human and scientific failures that led to the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

• Immeasurable Weather: Settler Colonialism and the American Weather Enterprise by Sara J. Grossman
  Weather science in the U.S. is entangled with settler colonialism (omg no way).

• Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
  A novel set during the coal boom in southern Appalachia, centered on mountaintop removal mining and catastrophic flooding. You will weep.

• “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury
  A short story in which stepping on a butterfly in the past alters the future. Published BEFORE the term was coined, and that’s Bradbury for ya.