Watts Up With That? by Kip Hansen – 25 July 2020
“The pioneering study of Lorenz in 1963 and a follow-up presentation in 1972 changed our view on the predictability of weather by revealing the so-called butterfly effect, also known as chaos. Over 50 years since Lorenz’s 1963 study, the statement of “weather is chaotic’’ has been well accepted.†Thus begins the abstract of a recent paper titled “Is Weather Chaotic? Coexisting Chaotic and Non-Chaotic Attractors within Lorenz Models†[
link to .pdf - link to PowerPoint presentation]
The authors include B.-W. Shen, R. A. Pielke Sr., X. Zeng, J.-J. Baik, S. Faghih-Naini, J. Cui, R. Atlas, and T. A. L. Reyes. Readers who follow the field of Chaos at the specialty group Chaotic Modeling and Simulation will be familiar with Shen and Zeng. Those who follow climate issues will recognize Roger Pielke Sr.
Here are the cites and links for studies by Edward N. Lorenz referenced in the above:
Lorenz, E., 1963a: Deterministic nonperiodic flow, J. Atmos. Sci., 20, 130-141.Lorenz, E. N., 1972: Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Proc. 139th Meeting of AAAS Section on Environmental Sciences, New Approaches to Global Weather: GARP, Cambridge, MA, AAAS, 5 pp.Shen et al. in this study (and other earlier papers) are trying to get a handle on the question posed. They want to know if the chaos that Lorenz (definition 2) found in his early toy weather model, which led to the accepted concept that “weather is chaotic†meant that weather (as we experience it in the real world day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month is really chaotic (as in definition 1 – completely confused or disordered, random, stochastic and in longer time sense, unpredictable).
Some people have an understanding of “generalized, high-dimensional Lorenz Models (GLM)†– they can wade through the fascinating published study (again, here). The rest of us might have an easier time with the PowerPoint presentation (here), though it is no walk in the park either.
More:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/25/chaos-and-weather/
