OUPS: Prof Hannah Christensen "Butterflies and Hurricanes: The Physics of Weather Prediction"

What the public often don't realise is that weather prediction is a problem in physics. Producing a weather forecast requires understanding the equations that describe the atmosphere, including the Navier-Stokes equations, and the equations of thermodynamics and radiation, among many others. But more fundamentally, it requires an appreciation of chaos theory, a special property of some systems including the atmosphere. In this talk I introduced the problem of atmospheric prediction, starting with how we produce forecasts on the timescale of a few days, before looking further and further ahead, through seasonal and decadal forecasts to climate prediction. We talked about chaos theory, uncertainty, predictability, and prediction. As Niels Bohr once said, "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future"