Annual Seminar 2019

The talk will discuss the development of ideas and capabilities over the past 50 years, and the phenomena and dynamics that give the potential for prediction.
The notion of chaos by Lorenz was originally conceived in the context of the long-range forecasting project in which he was employed at MIT. He was essentially showing that the project that employed him was hopeless! However, over the years, researchers using observational data and running state-of-the-art atmospheric models have been able to find hints that some skill may be possible on some occasions.
For me, the potential for predictability beyond the synoptic time-scale is based on the phenomena that occur on these time-scales and the dynamics and physics that underlies them. The talk will expand on this perspective, giving some examples.