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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and
satisfy some curiosity. I'm Galia and in this episode i'm joined by Antonia, Jennifer and Aneeqa to talk about forecasting weather and offer our points of view on why we care about the weather and our ability to forecast it i think it's super relevant topic given the last couple of days and i hope the content doesn't blow you away i feel like i had to make that i just worked the way it was worth the wait i think to start with what would be good is to define what we actually mean by
weather so where is basically the way in which the atmosphere behaves and how we experience that as humans and our human activity there are many components of weather so we can see this in sunshine rain wind sleet etc but it's really focused on a particular point in time and in a particular place so when you talk about whether you talk about it in minutes hours days at a push weeks and then climate is when you actually describe the long-term pattern of the weather of
a particular area so when it comes to weather forecasting that really is our understanding of our current science and technology to predict the conditions of the atmosphere at a given point and location i feel like that is a definition of weather does anybody else have any things that they want to add to this definition no i think that's a good definition and i think sometimes those things like last week can happen all in one day exactly so why is weather forecasting important
for my industry looking at kind of water resource planning understanding rainfall activity is extremely important it allows us to make sure that we have enough water to meet our demands for the foreseeable future and by demands i mean you know drinking water our agriculture uses our ability to use the dishwasher but also to make sure that there's enough water for the environment and we also need to understand where it rains because that really affects our flooding
and our drought planning so for me forecasting weather is extremely important i know for you antonia that it's also quite important to understand how this links to energy use yeah so in the energy industry the the weather determines how much energy we use when it's colder we'll have more heating on so that will affect um gas usage and to some extent electricity as we now have electric heating in homes when it comes to darker days as well we'll use more lighting now we are more efficient
lighting so that's changing and now with um technologies like wind and solar we do need to bear in mind the climate more than weather but it could still have an effect the recent gas price increase was from less wind as well as other supply chain issues i guess also you talked about like the cold but also the opposite when it's hot a lot of places around the world they have ac so in either case the energy's consumed in in kind of any climate almost any weather condition yeah that's a good point
i was thinking so much about the uk winter recently and storm dudley and eunice that i kind of forgot that there's hot climate and ac i hope we get to have that experience soon i'm very cold and it's very miserable outside how about you nico how about how why is weather forecasting and the weather important to you i walk everywhere or get the train and so it's quite nice to know if your train's cancelled because of trees falling onto the track and things like that so it's quite
useful just so that i can live my life that i'm not going to get blown away up a hill i think that's my personal experience it's more for just living my day-to-day life that's exactly what it is so i think it's super important to understand the weather for our human activities that's basically what it is it doesn't really matter if it rains in the middle of nowhere where no one lives but yeah it really affects your day to day jennifer you live in sweden so you
might be just laughing at us complaining about like short days and cold weather when you're like i live in sweden yeah how does it affect you well the other day i just woke up and it was completely white outside so and yeah i think the weather is uh it's kind of similar to the uk sometimes that it's really temperamental so one day you're like okay let me go get my bike and take a bike ride and then the next day it's snowing so yeah but overall i think it's very very cold here
conclusion everyone's just complaining about the weather this is such a british podcast everyone's just sat here talking about the miserable weather okay perfect so i guess that's why it's important to us it's important to us for our own industries but also just for us to be functionable humans day in day out so jennifer i think you know a bit about weather forecasting the history behind weather forecasting and how we use that today yeah i came across quite a few interesting points so one of the
earliest accounts of weather predictions are with the ancient babylonians so present-day iraq and syria about 650 for chrysler very long time ago they used the shape and appearance of clouds to predict the weather for shorter time periods and i guess many people still do this i mean i do whenever you see gray clouds outside you just i mean you know for certain that it's gonna rain so you head inside modern day weather forecasts in the uk started around mid 19th century according to one
article i found on the bbc super great source one person who had an impact on modern day weather forecasting was admiral robert fitzroy why was there a need for this you might ask well you have to understand that in the uk the consensus at this time was that weather predictions were impossible and ridiculous so if you tried to do this you were often laughed at and mocked but this admiral why he wanted to do this was many people that headed off to sea they lost their lives as a result of upcoming
turbulent weather so he wanted to inform them before they headed off to save lives basically he he started with these storm warnings that he sent off to different parts by telegraph as he continued he started to add other types of weather forecasts so not just storms but like whether it's going to be raining or cloudy and so on and it became more popular with the general public because before the target audience was fishermen sailors or anyone going off to sea and these predictions were also
published in newspapers but unfortunately many of these predictions were inaccurate and wrong so he got quite mixed reviews and you have to understand or think about fishermen who lost potential income because of these inaccurate predictions so in the end he was heavily criticized and mocked and he actually took his own life besides that well i think that really hones in on a particular point which we talk a lot about on this podcast and like science communication being one of them so we
understand like so he was looking at forecasting for example and trying to communicate that to the public which was really important but when you get it wrong the consequences of getting it wrong people just have like a massive distrust and just really kind of don't allow for that kind of um those inaccuracies to come through which is which is silent it's a hard thing to communicate yeah i agree not just inaccuracy but i guess just uncertainty seems to be something that
you know people like a straightforward answer whereas you have all sorts of scientific theories or even established science which we have but there's an asterisk there's a we're a little bit uncertain about it but then it can be you know people are saying they don't believe in science anymore but it's it's just a it's almost like a statistical um it's a word for it like probability probability yeah yeah we have a large collection now even though we don't know for certain it's almost 99
but we still have to disclaim there is that one percent of uncertainty like when your weather app says this 10 chance of rain but you look outside and it looks like someone's throwing water from a bucket out your window i think it's because that 10 isn't actually based on probability it's also based on area coverage so i think it's not just on probability but usually when you need to see a percentage you're like okay there's only 10 chance but actually there's a bit more to it than just the
probability of it raining in your area antonio just to go back to the modeling element in my industry we do a lot of modeling to kind of understand rainfall patterns precipitation so you know if we do have a massive reservoir is it going to be super hot super sunny all the time and most of the water is going to evaporate or is it going to be raining all the time so these are important but they're all based on the data that we have and then predicting scenarios for
the future and so we're getting better at the quality of our data at the moment there's weather stations all around the uk and it really helps to kind of understand what data we have and how we can manipulate that data but we're still not in a position where we can kind of hand on heart say this is the scenario that's going to happen over the next 10 20 30 40 years iniki you're talking about looking outside and trying to understand the weather forecast over the
next hour and here we're here in my industry trying to forecast for the next 80 hundred years so there's going to be a massive element of like understanding that and i think again what's difficult is that we're seeing we're seeing the effects of climate change but we really don't know what is actually going to happen we're still learning that so it's kind of learning on the job and trying to make our models learn on the job too which is not easy yeah there must be so many uncertainties with
climate change just because there'll be so much less data available on these new patterns that are emerging so yeah it must be a huge challenge in my industry we focus on like a one in ten scenarios so the chances of something you know looking at historically what happens in that ten year period we look at one in two hundred one and five hundred but those events are becoming a lot more frequent now so what used to be a one in two hundred year event so a flooding
event or a storm event is happening now like one in every 100 years so our understanding of these events are actually changing we're not sure how quickly they're changing and so that's why our input into the model isn't always accurate because we're changing all the time antonio what's your experiencing of modeling what what can what knowledge can you impart on us don't say that because i have no knowledge i have no knowledge i know that um you know there's different types of
modeling you can do you use historic data to forecast what might happen in the future and you would use correlations and if you grab multiple variables that have this effect then you would be creating a multi-linear regression model uh and that could be really good when you've got lots of historic data you can quite reliably say these conditions are repeatable but you know with climate change these variables have different effects on each other and like garlic said the statistical chances
of these extreme events are happening more i guess another way would be to actually create a model based on principles so based on like if pressure is at this water humidity um levels in the air all this kind of thing then we could try and forecast the weather based on that but i think at that point you need quite a big chunky computer to to be able to do or deal all those data points because we want we want localized weather information because if you think about the mass of air over
over one area and you have to model all of that with all the different changes at any given time it's a lot of data to crunch in one go yeah you need a lot of computational power to be able to determine that and then i guess that begs the question like is it worth it do we really need to know exactly what the weather is going to be like at a very specific point in time i mean anika does so that she doesn't get you said blown up the hill i think you said at one point oh yeah i've been like
also like my trains are just always cancelled anyway regardless of the weather so i don't know why that's even why they bother for that anyway but yeah i've it was so windy like it was it was just ridiculous but i think that's a really good point that antonio raises about how localized we need to be like do i need to know what's happening in my garden probably not but do i need to know what's happening in all of manchester that's probably like more useful information to
know but it can be very hyper localized or you don't need to know in your garden but if i was to come up with a flood evacuation plan i need to know more than your garden but the whole of manchester is a bit too big so i need to be able to understand that and i think because of the way we in which we've developed so a lot of areas that used to be grasslands um or places that could absorb water and is now concrete essentially or or things that really don't absorb in the water it means we
get a lot of flash flooding so it's just instant a lot of flood basically because it rains very heavily and so our modeling doesn't actually always take that into account so we can understand that it might rain a lot in that area but the consequences of that is what we actually really need to understand so okay so it's going to rain super like a lot but it's okay because that's kind of the sea but if it's like in central london that's actually a big issue we could see
a lot of flash flooding so it's it's a kind of understanding what the consequences of that what the output of that model is and what that how that translates to us did any of you watch the latest russian grand prix uh nope you speaking to the wrong audience no no but this had a huge consequence so this is formula one and not across the racetrack it started raining but some bits were were drier and some bits were wetter and you know they have different ties for different conditions and because it
was changeable a lot of people were going to change their ties which would add time so they would lose their their position in track and lando norris was leading him and his team thought that the rain wasn't that bad the team had the information on screen to see whether how the rainfall was coming and you know they're looking at one minute intervals because you know across the track they go you know a lapse like one minute two minutes and so they needed that data to see how
much rain was there going to be he was coming into the last few laps of the race he didn't pit and lewis who was just behind him um did and just after that lando uh spun lost position and lost his first win so you know sometimes we do maybe need that hyper localized minute by minute forecasts of rain having that information obviously is really important in that situation but for your average person who doesn't know much about weather their experience is probably just in things that they see on
in like on netflix or in movies and i think that the kind of doomsday kind of like the weather everything's gonna we're all gonna die basically comes out across a lot and i think that um anika is someone who specializes in extreme weather binge watching documentaries slash films none of them are documentaries none of them real life yet it's only like fictional oh sorry my bad here's me thinking it's a documentary it's all fictional but it's true i think people are interested in it because it
does affect everyone so much so there's like always been so many movies about big changes in the weather so the day after tomorrow is like one of my childhood favorite uh movies and it motivated me to actually go into science because i saw all the research no one listened to the scientist though which hasn't changed um so i don't know why like i didn't pick up on that no one listens to scientists uh and yeah i should have realized that at the time but yeah so
this guy was like had these models that he'd built up using old historical data like from the ice age and stuff and no one was listening to him that like the world's just going to something not very nice and there was just an ice age and like helicopters were freezing in the sky and like falling down not very realistic but after the storms this week i'm like yeah could happen why not also i think it plays a big role in um setting the scene for a lot of things so like in a lot of
stories like wizard of oz for example that's like there's a tornado and dorothy ends up not in kansas oh in oz obviously i was like where did she go she goes to us um through this tornado also the plot of a fabulous kdrama called crash landing on you where a woman is testing a paraglider and ends up in north korea because of a tornado so tornadoes are ruthless guys um they can take you to all sorts of places so can we have a little disclaimer um if you get if you get caught in a tornado
firstly try not to get caught up in a tornado secondly chances of you surviving that and end up being ending up in a completely different continent i'm not sure she was in south korea to be fair okay it wasn't that like okay first he wasn't in manchester and ended up in north korea and also linking back to what jennifer was saying at the beginning about storms and that was the reason why these weather forecasts did come into play that i think it obviously does have a
huge huge impact on people's lives especially these big events i think having the information that is so like this week i think not much has changed from what you explained jennifer before about like the warnings for storms like here it's also they still did like yellow warning amber red yeah i don't think much has changed in terms of the purpose of the forecast from when it first started and i think what we've talked a lot about um kind of forecasting weather but there's also this other side
where we we are trying to kind of understand whether to kind of manipulate it and to be able to kind of control it within ourselves so there's um i'll give you an example there's something called cloud seeding and that's a form of geoengineering which is kind of controversial but it basically involves using silver iodide and um getting that into clouds and via aircraft basically putting it putting those cars wherever you want them to be and then that i'm not entirely sure
about the chemistry but that the silver iodide then reacts and then droplets come down so trying to kind of manipulate rain and i guess that's a whole of the discussion but our understanding of weather is encouraging some people to actually use that to manipulate what we understand of weather at the moment so i guess like that's kind of the flip side of forecasting it's like okay there's the forecasting element but actually like people are trying to control it as
well so they do this in the uae yeah because i have some family there and i remember like being told oh yeah they're making it rain today and i'd be like what's like that's [Laughter] that's not real like how how can they do this and i can't believe that's 80 years old yeah it's been around for a while i think it was it was around for a while because of initially for more agricultural uses to see if it was possible um it's not a very good form of agricultural use you know like
irrigation is usually kind of more water effective and water efficient but in the emirates i'm assuming it's because it's super hot and they need to cool people down and cool the environment down i also wonder what changing the weather how that affects forecasting the weather doing these things which change the weather does that change the weather even more i don't know if that makes sense yeah like is there a long-term effect yeah cloud seeding yeah i mean if if we're going by movie logic like
it's like cloudy with a chance of meatballs it can because if you put your your cloud seeding technology um into the clouds what if it just eats up all the clouds and infinitely makes it rain food obviously not very realistic but it does have the implication of are we changing things against what they were before equally you know if we could make drought areas have more water why wouldn't we do that i think the only kind of concern or issue i have with that is that we are
not going to the source of the problem so we're kind of not really fixing the issue so if there's a reason why we're um kind of taking away a lot of um groundwater from our area and that's causing some kind of like drought then we're not helping the situ we're we're not going back to the root cause of what the issue is and i think you can just introduce more problems if you're not addressing the actual issue at hand but it's it's a much bigger discussion it's quite a wide um area which people
are talking about apart from rain no one's really doing that much more no one really wants to kind of stimulate another storm event to be honest most people would shy away from that but i think it's really predominantly on like rain at the moment unless unless anyone knows anything else but i only know really um kind of manipulating rain that's all i've heard of even even in the film world anika yeah i'm trying to think yeah i can't think of any um unless we mentioned the other the other
k drama that we've been well our producer laura has started watching it we haven't watched it yet it's predicting love and weather so if you want to include love in the forecast you can but that's um that's a whole other podcast i think i think we've also had a look at when i say we i mean geoengineering has had a look at if we can recreate the clouds to prevent as much um global warming by shading the earth so that we have less solar radiation yeah so that we even
though we have the greenhouse gas effect maybe if we just let a little less sunlight in in the first place maybe all that will stay again massive changes to i guess climate as opposed to weather so yeah really it's climate engineering but also are there these like projects like um where they recreate a climate in a enclosed location like i'm sure there's one there's an asian project project so it's like a bubble and in it they've got like a whole ecosystem and it rains in there and they try and
recreate all of these things i think so the purpose of that is looking at like an ecosystem so it's kind of um you're managing and controlling like humidity rain all that kind of stuff but so you can control that environment to allow a particular ecosystem to flourish but i don't know about like like kind of creating a world where you can then introduce lightning and then storm and then sleet i don't know about if that kind of mini world exists possibly if you could control the weather would
you still include some of the more extreme things like tornadoes lightning snow sleet who who likes sleep like would we choose to keep sleeves in the mix or hail i i think this is when we had to take a step back and think about all the other species in the environment in the world i don't know the benefit of sleep like ladybugs or like trees i don't know the effects it has on like the wider environment um but yeah if we're looking at our own human species possibly not
but it might like looking further afield it might actually be beneficial i don't know how that is true because i'm i remembered that so i used to live in france and i used to have forest fires and apparently this type of tree only propagates its pollen or whatever through i don't know if it's pollen whatever the seeds um but when they're burnt like that's like they need that to like grow so that's like a natural process that's been happening for thousands of years it's
just a problem now because people live next to it that it's really dangerous yeah obviously because of climate change like burning whole forest is really bad also but it's something that used to happen naturally like it was a natural way for that like ecosystem to survive and i think because we've talked about these changes in weather becoming like how we would change the weather but i think it has changed hasn't it like throughout history it's just now changing uh on like
in front of our eyes an unprecedented accelerated rate i guess because there has wasn't an ice age in europe um like i feel that europe was covered in ice at some point in history yeah and also like uh other areas like rivers have disappeared in like prehistoric civilizations there might have been a river and now there's no river in in that area so i think it has always happened and will always happen it's just humans have accelerated those changes right like from a human
from a human perspective i can only really speak from human perspective but um i think the issue is not necessarily just about the acceleration i think it's a as a point of um we are no longer resilient to it so we've built our environment to cater for a particular event of any kind and we're at a point now in our history where because of our actions yeah things are becoming a bit more extreme and we're just not resilient to that and that's the main reason why we're really
taking any action if if we were still resilient to all this i doubt that there would be there could be a billion other reports on climate change coming out but i don't think anyone would take any real action but we're seeing the consequences of that and we know that we can't sustain this yeah i assume i don't know if that's a very cynical way of looking i know i think that's right i guess yeah from a conservation point of view people would have said the ecosystem
is getting pushed beyond the point of resilience that we're losing so many species and they would have been there if it wasn't for humans so in a sense we do kind of have to take action because it was our fault yeah yeah i agree when we bring this back to forecasting i think we have to be really holistic like we can't just focus on only the rain for example because surely other things affect how the rain impacts the environment that we're in so whether that is windy or whether um
what as you said before like what the environment's made of things like that so yeah maybe it's will rain only a little bit but a little bit in an area where they've built loads of concrete and there's not very good drainage and things like that could be really severe so having that holistic thing i think must be really challenging for for modelers because it's not just the physical weather patterns it's how it interacts with the environment that we're in that i think is a real challenge
i think also what's also a challenge is that they all they're all interdependent like the weather itself so the reason why we have rain is because of pressure differences which allows the wind to happen and so the wind and the rain are very connected and so if you start changing one i don't know like on what scale that has to be changed for it to kind of affect everything else and i don't think we understand it well enough yet first to like kind of like play god
with the weather and see what happens like okay let's see what happens when we do this so before we end up making our own little world um with lots of different um with i don't know in antonia's world there's no sleet in anika's world it's like an ice age and like the day after tomorrow it sounds like a good place probably to leave before we deviate completely off topic so it's clear that we're still in a position where we're using historical data to kind of forecast the weather and
we're not there yet with like complete accuracy in terms of like um forecasting it to the millimeter for the next like 10 20 30 years we're getting a lot better at it the main reason why we seem to be wanting to improve our modeling is just how it really affects us as humans and our human activity and as jennifer mentioned at the early stages communicating that to people understanding what that weather means to us is extremely important because it affects not only anika's train
cancellations but people's livelihoods and incomes and i think that's really really important to draw attention to that our predictions really are as good as our assumptions and we're still still trying to improve those assumptions as we're going forward and maybe going forward we'll be able to change the weather as well as we have tried to predict in this podcast thank you very much everybody if you're interested in what we've said please find us on twitter or instagram if you want to
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