Can you imagine this, a clear water puddle with a silt deposited at the bottom. When i stirred the puddle gently, the mud below rising up and form various turbulence shape and also some small tornadoes. So i'm wondering if the same thing happen in our atmosphere where the water represent the air while the mud represent clouds. If it same, can we use computational fluid dynamics to calculated the behavior of the cloud especially for tornadoes and hurricanes??

we do use computational fluid dynamics to predict what the weather is going to do. its a major part of weather forcasting and climate prediction.

 

however, due to the huge computational load of simulating a planetary scale fluid(largely due to achieving sufficient resolution to be accurate over such a large area) the simulations start diverging from reality after a few days and a few years down the line they will be completely inaccurate in terms of weather. in terms of climate we can look a few decades down the line before the there is too much divergence.

 

That said, a lot of weather forecasting can be done by rules of thumb if you don't mind slightly lower success rates. me, i use the 'look out the window' approach.

As so often, wikipedia has a website about it.

 

In addition to what insane_alien mentioned (I agree with all of it), the weather simulations suffer from a lack of input, which is twofold.

- Geological details influence the weather. Features may be missing (the famous butterfly can actually influence the weather, so every leaf on every tree counts).

- Weather stations are scarce. In some countries, the density of weather stations can be 1 station per 1000 km2... but in other areas, this can be a lot lower.

 

With weather predictions, just like with any other model, the principle of Garbage in, garbage out is valid. The lack of weather stations means that the input is limited. Logically, the output is therefore also wrong - especially on the long term, the predictions will likely be wrong.

Thanks for the great link CP! and yes i think i couldn't agree more with you two, weather & climate isn't something we could calculated with math isn't it? It's differ from astronomy where we can put math in it. I wonder why climate & weather doesn't have computable patterns...

Thanks for the great link CP! and yes i think i couldn't agree more with you two, weather & climate isn't something we could calculated with math isn't it? It's differ from astronomy where we can put math in it. I wonder why climate & weather doesn't have computable patterns...

 

I disagree. We can calculate it with maths (and physics/chemistry). We just need more input (more weather stations). We're already able to predict the weather up to 7 days ahead!

 

Regarding the climate, we look at less details, so less input is required. Still, maths is used (although no CFD, to my knowledge).