Weather watchers forecast better forecasts

Brian Farrell, the Robert P. Burden Professor of Meteorology, is spearheading a project that is part of a five-year initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research to spark progress in the general area of predictability of the atmosphere and oceans. "Right now we have a fairly good forecast out to 48 hours," Farrell says, "maybe two or three days. After that, you never know." The reason for this, he adds, is that starting out with a certain amount of error is inevitable. Both the observational data and the mathematical model used to parse it are imperfect; the necessity of using them together only compounds the problem.

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