The writer is author of ‘The Weather Machine’
On a misty evening several years ago, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, I watched one of the world’s most advanced computer weather models cycle through its twice-daily perambulation into the atmosphere of the near future.
While the screen in front of me flashed prosaic status messages, the supercomputer down the hall crunched trillions of variables each second. Over two hours, it used equations of physics to transform the most recent weather observations into a high resolution picture of the following 14 days of sky. This would become the raw material of meteorologists’ forecasts around the world — useful for choosing a jacket, flying a jetliner or seeking shelter from a storm. The modern forecast is an astonishing achievement of technology and scientific co-operation, painstakingly assembled over the past half-century.