Weather is the archetypical example of a chaotic system. Indeed, it was his calculations of weather models that led Edward Lorenz to his landmark 1963 paper that helped launch modern chaos theory. (See the article by Adilson Motter and David Campbell, Physics Today, May 2013, page 27.) Lorenz famously gave a 1972 talk titled “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Chanh Kieu and Zachary Moon at Indiana University Bloomington now report on a related question: How well can we forecast the intensity of a hurricane? For steady conditions, Kerry Emanuel has shown that thermodynamic arguments yield a wind speed—the standard measure of hurricane intensity—that’s a reasonable upper bound for a majority of observed storms (see Emanuel’s Quick Study, Physics Today, August 2006, page 74). Using a minimal dynamic model, Kieu and Moon found that the limiting...
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1 July 2016
July 01 2016
Chaos limits predictability of hurricane intensities
Physics Today 69 (7), 25 (2016);
Citation
Richard J. Fitzgerald; Chaos limits predictability of hurricane intensities. Physics Today 1 July 2016; 69 (7): 25. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3226
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