February 7, 2025
This is a recent article in The Conversation, authored by our Director, Andy Hogg, Associate Director Kelsey Druken and Release Team leader, Aidan Heerdegen.
Weather forecasts help you decide whether to go for a picnic, hang out your washing or ride your bike to work. They also provide warnings for extreme events, and predictions to optimise our power grid.
To achieve this, services such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology use complex mathematical representations of Earth and its atmosphere – weather and climate models.
The same software is also used by scientists to predict our future climate in the coming decades or even centuries. These predictions allow us to plan for, or avoid, the impacts of future climate change.
Weather and climate models are highly complex. The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, for example, is comprised of millions of lines of computer code.
Without climate and weather models we would be flying blind, both for short-term weather events and for our long-term future. But how do they work – and how are they different?
Read why and more on the complete, original article here: What’s the difference between climate and weather models? It all comes down to chaos
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Credit image: Isabella Rosso