Weather Forecasting: Sometimes, things Get Better

Predicting the future is hard. Political pundits, as everyone knows, are usually wrong. Ditto stock market analysts. Earthquake forecasting has yet to a reach a point at which anyone pays attention. But one group of predictors is getting better all the time: weather forecasters. Over the course of my lifetime, weather forecasting has gotten dramatically better, to the point that three-day forecasts are now highly reliable.

In 1972, the service’s high-temperature forecast missed by an average of six degrees when made three days in advance. Now it’s down to three degrees. 

There are many reasons for this: satellites, supercomputers, and so on, but according to Nate Silver another factor is the weather forecasters' sophisticated attitude toward randomness and imprecision. After all, the branch of math we call 'Chaos Theory' sprang from attempts to model the weather. Since they start from a bedrock assumption that their predictive power is limited, weather forecasters have a better understanding of what they do know.

As we all know from watching economists and stock analysts, it's the people who claim to be certain who know the least.