This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Video of the Week #107, August 29th, 2013:
From:The Most Breathtaking Video of the Weather You’ll Watch This Week by Evelyn Lamb at Roots of Unity.
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Source:NOAA Visualizations
187 seconds. 3641 images. That’s all it takes to visually highlight the tension between the chaotic unpredictability of the weather and its repetitiveness in this new video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showcasing the past 10 years of weather in the Americas. The images (one photo per day) are drawn from data collected by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-12, which monitored the weather in North and South America since April 2003. It shut down on August 16. On a day-to-day basis, we are limited in how well we can predict the weather — 14 days is the upper limit, even with ensemble forecasting techniques — because it’s such a chaotic system, but we can also assume that we’ll see certain weather patterns in certain places at certain times of the year, like hurricanes. Hurricane Sandy shows up at the 2:50 mark in the video, forming and dissipating in the blink of an eye.
