Headline Jan 1, 2012 / The Lost Game

THE LOST GAME

OF

WEATHER FORECASTING 

While most scientists are revered for making sense of our complex universe (Einstein is practically a hero), meteorologists often face ridicule. How can we put a person on the moon or foretell planetary alignments years in advance, yet still fail to put together accurate weather forecasts?

On September 20, 2011 six Italian scientists and a government official were set to go to trial for not doing their duty in aggressive communication of the risk of an impending earthquake. They faced charges of manslaughter for the earthquake killed more than 300 people in 2009 in L'Aquila.

Predicting an earthquake days or weeks in advance in never easy for scientists. It demands knowledge to understand the stresses deep in the Earth and that which parts of the crust are so weak that those stresses are going to cause ruptures.

A butterfly flapping its wings (or some other small phenomenon) in one place can, in principle, alter the subsequent weather pattern in a distant place. At the core of this effect is chaos theory, which deals with how small changes in certain variables can cause apparent randomness in complex systems. That's what makes the weather so unpredictable.

Scientists have been successful in solving most complex problems but failure to accurately predict weather and disasters has posed serious threats specially when the catastrophes are increasing with passing years.