Chaos Hot Spots
The key to improving weather forecasts may lie in the discovery of atmospheric ?hot spots?– regions in which small changes in conditions magnify quickly into large changes in the weather.
Researchers from the University of Maryland have shown that not all chaos on a weather map is equal, and they?ve developed a technique for identifying regions they call chaos hot spots. These hot spots shift location on a regular basis and cover about 20 percent of the global map at any given time.
?This work has tremendous potential for improving both the accuracy of existing forecasts and for increasing the length of time into the future that the weather can be predicted accurately,? says math professor James Yorke, principle investigator for the research project. read more