Forecast

Oh my interest in Meteorology! I love to watch the weatherman and see the weak limb they will crawl out on to give us a long range forecast. Scientifically, there is no way to predict the weather beyond four days in the future. Even then the accuracy is not that great. It is not even perfect quite closer in time. How many times can you remember being told it would be a certain temperature that day, say 75 degrees F, and late that afternoon your thermometer read 87 degrees? How could that forecast have been so wrong? Actually the question we should be asking more often is how was that forecast so close to being right? The atmosphere is a classic chaotic system. Being accurate is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Recently there has been great disorder in the weather of Arizona. Tremendous amounts of rain have fallen. Some areas have received more rain than has ever been recorded for August. Where 6 weeks ago was a whithering drought, is now a lush landscape. And the long range forecast for August 6 weeks ago? Normal rainfall, no relief from the drought.

Thunderstorms swirl around me today. I managed to get laundry out and dry on the clothesline before any rain fell. It hasn't yet rained today. No clever scientist, no churning computer can tell me, for sure, if it will rain. It is all chaos.