61% Chance of Rain

 

by Pa Rock

Weather Watcher

Some evenings before I crawl into bed I spend a few minutes chatting with Alexa,  Since AI has hit its stride, she is getting better in her ability to do things other than just serve as a deejay.  She can answer a broad range of questions on standard subjects like history, politics, and science, and she even performs math calculations.  I haven't asked Alexa for a bedtime story yet, but I have no doubt that my friend could rattle off a doozy.

Last Sunday evening as I was getting ready to go to bed I asked Alexa for the next day's weather forecast.  She replied with a quick encapsulation of anticipated temperatures and weather conditions.  The thing that stood out in her prediction for Monday's weather was a "61% chance of rain."  I was so surprised with the specificity that I asked her to repeat the rain chance - and she did, with the same exact percentage.

It's been a while since I've been to school, but I have a basic understanding of percentages.  A 61% chance of rain means that the chances are 61 out of 100 that it will rain.   Math, however, wasn't my forte, and I never had any classes in meteorology, so I am fuzzy on how she came up with that exact number.  Somewhere there must be an list of observable inputs that get run through a proven math calculation that spits out an exact percentage of rain chances for a specific area.

Lee George, the weatherman on KODE Channel 12 in Joplin, Missouri, in the 1960's, would have been astounded at how far weather prediction has come in just sixty years, and now, with the growth in knowledge accelerating exponentially, every facet of weather will soon become as predictable as sunrise - and perhaps it already is, but Elon and the Gods on Olympus won't release the process until they figure out how to maximize their profits for sharing that knowledge.

It didn't rain on Monday, at least not at my house.  I guess that 61% could have meant that 61% of West Plains would get rain - and I was in the 39% that missed out, but the more likely explanation is that even with our growing knowledge of our planet and its weather patterns, weather prediction is not yet an exact science - but it's getting there.