THE FUTURE OF WEATHER FORECASTING*

By R. C. SUTCLIFFE, F.R.S.
Meteorological O B e , London

0 NE result of the unprecedentedly rapid advances in science and techno-

logy which we are experiencing at the present time is a widespread aware-
ness of change and a preoccupation with the future. Perhaps for the first time
in history thinking people everywhere are wondering how their ways of living,
their civilizations, will be altered with the passing of but a few years, a decade
or a generation and, with every specialist 'interest asking this same question,
it is not surprising that the Council of the Society should have suggested to
me a discourse on the future of forecasting. Meteorologists may be classified
as forecasters or non-forecasters and I am happy to claim membership of the
former group, a club which has only life members ; for once a forecaster always
a forecaster. I could if I wished give the names of meteorologists, including
some eminent ones, who have made no professional forecast since World War
I , but who are yet ready a t any opportunity to give an account of their brilliant
successes. My own career as a professional forecaster ended with World War
I1 but I intend to trade on that experience indefinitely and to accept any in-
vitation I may receive to pose as an authority.
On this occasion I shall not attempt to give an impression of the organiza-
tional complexity of observations, world-wide communications, charting and
analysis which lies behind the forecast. Neither shall I attempt an outline
of the concepts and techniques of synoptic meteorology. All this I shall
assume to be familiar and my remarks will be made against this background.
But I would like to make a comment on prediction in general. It is often said,
and in a special sense rightly, that prediction is the aim and the crucial test of
all science but if from this it is argued that weather forecasting is typical of
scientific work in general, the argument is mere rhetoric if not sophistry.
Weather forecasting far from being typical is more nearly unique in science
and I can think of no other profession where one is called upon continuously to
predict the course of natural events. The weather forecaster does not have
the incentive of the basic physicist who may dream of transforming the world
with his discoveries ; he does not have that of the chemist who may synthesize
new substances of untold worth ; he cannot, as can the biochemist or physician,
think in terms of discovering and destroying the agents of disease ; he has not
the urge of the economist or sociologist to improve the lot of mankind by well-
conceived legislation and controls. Indeed if scientists sparing a moment
from enjoying their work will look without bias at what they are doing or
contributing towards, whether or not deliberately, they will recognize that it
is almost entirely the control of nature or the alteration of our environment
* Based on an Evening Discourse given to the Society on 7 January 1959.
by inventiveness. They are indeed essentially engineers from whom the
weather forecaster per se stands almost isolated, as the purest of scientists.
He is a true intellectual striving only to understand and foresee the ways of
providence in full piety with no ulterior aim of control. It is a rarefied
atmosphere in which to live and it is not surprising if under this never-ending
intellectual strain he sometimes feels himself ‘ in disgrace with fortune and
men’s eyes . . . desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope ’. But he also
experiences an incomparable intellectual satisfaction when pure thought leads
to verified truth and then he may say, in the words of the same sonnet, ‘ I
scorn to change my state with kings ’.
But what of the future ? Is it possible that there is no future in fore-
casting, that our select and unique profession will disappear from the face of
the earth ? It is not a manifestly foolish question. Perhaps the engineers
will progress so f a r that everything about us is man-made and man-controlled
and no one is interested in nature unadorned. Then there will be no room for
our pure intellectualism-or at least no one to pay our salaries for we shall be
useless. Obviously there is a danger here-we may control our environment
to such an extent that it becomes worthless to predict what might have happened
without control-but I shall assume that this danger is sufficiently far away to
leave plenty of time for forecasting to enjoy a future before it dies, although
there will be changes in the emphasis as the applied interests vary. It is well
known that the expansion in synoptic meteorology and forecasting services
since World War I has come under the compelling pressure of aviation needs,
civil and military-and this pressure remains still the most urgent. Some
people, foreseeing the advance of aviation until it becomes safe in all weathers
and fast enough to take the winds in its stride, predict that aviation weather
services will soon be unnecessary. This facile prediction is, however, not to be
relied upon for those in the business realise that knowledge of winds and
weather is so built into aviation procedures that for them to function without
it is hard to imagine, although it is true that the element of forecasting is not
as large as the element of reporting and may become even less. But no-one
will be any the poorer if aviation should lessen its demand for scientific fore-
casting provided it maintains its demand for data and good communications.
These are the raw material for all forecasting and there is a field of application
in industry, transport, holidays and sport which is little explored and almost
certainly large. In the United States quite considerable weather consultant
services flourish by providing special forecasts, and other information, to those
prepared to pay for them. The same system may be less suitable in other
countries but t h e demand is probably there and worth stimulating and satis-
fying. Therefore, since even in a democracy what it is economically good
sense to do has a fair chance of being done in time. I shall predict a great
expansion in applied forecasting in the years immediately ahead. There is
no opportunity here to elaborate on this aspect of things but I would like to
record my conviction that at the present time meteorologists who aim to be
helpful economically will find full scope in the applications to other activities

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of the knowledge they already possess. Far from being a backward science,
meteorology and forecasting have outstripped their applications.
Some attention must also be given to the technology of the profession for
it is here that spectacular changes may be most confidently predicted without
going beyond what is known already to be practicable. Forecasting depends
on the collection and collation of standard types of observations made at
hundreds of places scattered over the world and, from the observatory to the
plotted weather map, each observation may be ' handled ' a dozen times : the
observing and recording, the encoding, the recording on teletype, the reception
and punching on tape, the retransmission in collective messages and further
reception, passing in some way to a chart plotter, decoding, plotting and then
the assessment and prediction. Some stages in this long process are already
automatic and improvements are on the way but there have always been two
main difficulties, at the beginning and at the end of the line. Of these the
first, the making of observations, has been overcome in principle and economic
considerations will eventually decide whether automatic observing stations are
to replace the human observer on the ground as well as in the upper atmosphere
where automation has long been the rule. At the other end of the line it is
curious that chart plotting, that tedious hurried repetitive process, has not
been mechanized but surely it will be unless it is abandoned as unnecessary.
Charts and diagrams are of course amongst the most powerful and flexible
ways of representing and co-ordinating information especially if the information
is to be further treated subjectively. Since the human mind may think best
in pictures the synoptic chart may be with us a long time but it could be
constructed automatically and the actual operation of prediction can be per-
formed electronically provided it can be codified and programmed, that is to
say provided it is not a subjective judgment of the expert mind. We are
moving steadily in this direction and recently an advanced electronic computing
machine was installed for research purposes at the Meteorological Office,
Dunstable. It seems a very safe prediction to say that objective methods
will more and more replace subjective judgments and that electronic data-
processing and calculating machines will become normal equipment of a fore-
casting office but I shall not elaborate on this theme on this occasion as I want
to devote my attention to more fundamental matters. After all an electronic
computer is for us merely an ingenious tool for carrying out laborious tasks.
It has in a sense completely transformed practical mathematical physics but
it has not affected the physical problems as such. It would not be unreasonable
to suppose that the weather forecaster of the future will have readily accessible
all the observational data he may require and that any specifiable calculations
which he may fairly ask for will be carried out with acceptable speed. But
even so there will still remain the scientific question : how far into the future
and with what degree of accuracy is it likely that the forecaster will be able to
see ? Will the improvement on present performance be as revolutionary as
may be the methods of obtaining the results ?
It is of course all too easy to be sweepingly optimistic in the belief that
science has no limitations but there is nothing of meteorological interest in a n
assertion of faith unsupported by reason. With therefore the admission that
all things are possible I shall only try to see ahead where there seems to be a
glimmer of light. Exercises of this nature usually lead to apparent limitations,
to expressions of impotence, but in this way more than any other do we see
where our deepest difficulties lie ; the exercise may then not be without profit.
The problem of weather prediction is that of specifying the state, structure
and behaviour of the atmosphere, a fluid with an unlimited number of degrees
of freedom, the state of which can never be specified or observed, much less
predicted, in complete detail. We may fairly assume that the laws of classical
fluid dynamics and physics as represented by well-known differential equations
are sufficiently accurate for all weather forecasting purposes and that, given
the initial and boundary conditions, the physical problem is in principle
already reduced to mathematics.
Omitting certain complications of atmospheric constitution (for example
cloudiness) we may accept seven scalar quantities for a complete specification
of the state of the atmosphere-pressure, temperature, density, humidity
and three components of velocity-and we may write down seven independent
equations relating them. These might be the gas equation, eliminating one
from the redundant set of pressure, temperature and density, and the six
conservation equations, one for mass, one for energy, one for moisture and three
for momentum. The boundary conditions are more difficult, aggravated by
feed-back complications in the sources and sinks of energy, momentum and
humidity, but it is still possible to imagine the whole complex of data being
fed into a machine programmed to proceed step by step giving estimates of
all the quantities through time. Perhaps this will come, but when it does it
will merely be the routine procedure of forecasting, not the science, and if we are
to judge predictability we must analyse the problem.
The practical synoptic forecaster confronted with this very complicated
problem does not attack it like a bull a t a gate but takes it a little a t a time.
He categorizes the problems of local conditions, air mass properties, cyclo-
genesis and the like, thinks of them independently and then seeks to combine
them into a consistent whole. He may do everything empirically, but he is
doing almost exactly the same thing as the theoretician who, unable t o tackle
the physics in all its complexity, looks for special simple solutions to idealized
isolated problems and hopes that their interactions will not remove all value
from the ideal solutions.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable properties of the atmosphere, physi-
cally very complicated and with innumerable degrees of freedom, is the fact
that the weather can be described with some approach to adequacy in terms of
only a small number of types of phenomena or categories of behaviour which
might be listed as follows :
I. LARGE-SCALE WEATHER SYSTEMS-qUaSi-hOriZOntal and geostrophic
(a) Primary or planetary systems : the major anticyclones, cyclones and long
wave features.
Scale ~,ooo--~o,ooo
km.

166
 (b) Secondary sys’tems : the smaller anticyclones and cyclones.
Scale 100-1,000 km.
2. MESO-SCALE WEATHER SYSTEMS-intermediate, often topographical.
Scale 10-100 km.
3. SMALL-SCALE WEATHER SYSTEMS-qUaSi-VertiCal convective systems, cumulus,
showers, thunderstorms.
Scale 1-10 km.
4. DISCONTINUITY SYSTEMS-fronts, inversions, tropopauses.
Vertical scale I km.
5. SURFACE BOUNDARY SYSTEMS-fOgS, low turbulence cloud, orographic clouds,
land and sea breezes, local winds.
Vertical scale I km.
This list is not of course inclusive of everything of importance, but it
goes a remarkably long way towards categorizing the forecaster’s problem.
There is a short period forecasting problem because these categories exist, the
secret of our success in forecasting lies in their predictability and the limitations
to our success in their unpredictability. Now, setting aside the fifth category, ’
all the systems have this in common, that they come into existence by emerging
from their environment, they have a period of development, they last for a
time and then disappear once more into their environment, and the phase of
development is self-generating, of a divergent or instability character. It
seems impossible to formulate a prediction problem for the life history of any
such individual until it has become recognizable and definable.
Now this limitation, if it is valid, sets rather strict limits to weather fore-
casting, limits which we recognized intuitively when forecasting began a
century ago, which have stood firm as time barriers against every assault and
which, so f a r as I can see, will stand indefinitely. As there are categories of
behaviour so there are categories of predictability such that the type of forecast
possible for I hour ahead in showery weather will never be possible for 12 hours
-or even 3 hours ; the type of forecast possible for 12 hours in cyclonic
weather will never be possible for several days. Without describing here what
is broadly familar to all I would say that weather forecasting up to a
few days ahead will remain limited in precision in much the same way as it is
today with improvements in accuracy and in presentation, useful but not
revolutionary. I see no pessimism ’ in this view, a t least no meteorological
pessimism, for I know of no branch of science where similar limitations are
not accepted. The future is in practical terms inscrutable because large
disturbances come from small beginnings and the precision of prediction
must with time fall below the threshold of precision required for further
extrapolation. And the clarity of the future does not simply fade away
gradually into the unknown but weakens i n . stages as the structure
on successive scales falls below the prediction threshold. The time barriers to
prediction seem to indicate the structure of the universe more than they do
our powers of logical thought and unless some adult suggestion is made on how
to overcome them, to say they will be overcome is childish.
Up to this point I have been concerned with short period forecasting for,
at most, a few days ahead during a period in which success depends mainly on
predicting the behaviour of recognizable and identifiable sub-systems of the

167
atmosphere system as a whole. For a greater period of time ahead-for long
range forecasting-we are concerned with a physical problem which in some
ways is essentially different and it is interesting to ask why there should be a
problem of long range forecasting at all.
If one is describing the general circulation of the atmosphere it is customary
to refer to the mean state, the climatological average which varies with the
season, upon which is superposed ' turbulence ' on the synoptic scale-a time
scale of a few days. It is implicit in this model that one January, say, would
be much like another apart from the sampling differences occasioned by the
phasing and intensities of the synoptic turbulence elements and, in that case,
there would be no problem of long-range forecasting beyond the time barrier set
by the predictability of the individual synoptic systems themselves. But this
is not the position. In extra-tropical latitudes at least, any two months of
like name may differ much more than can be explained by different samples of
passing depressions and anticyclones, to such an extent that it is justifiable t o
say that the general circulation itself varies from year to year. There are
anomalies which it would be very much worthwhile to be able to predict and
most interesting to explain.
The field of long-range forecasting has attracted in the past, and indeed
still attracts, all sorts of hopeful empirical studies, amateur speculations and
charlatanism. This is to be expected, for ground uncultivated becomes a
tangle of weeds and it is impossible to estimate what sort of useful crop may
come by accident in this way. However, I think there is much promise for
the future. For some years now, indeed for some decades, long-range forecast-
ing has been seriously practised in various countries by people neither incompe-
tent nor immoral. In India we had a pioneer in Sir Gilbert Walker, in Russia
Multanovsky, in Germany Baur, in U.S.A. more recently Namias. I do not
think that more than modest success is claimed for any of them nor do I think
their methods are scientifically very attractive. But they have explored the
field and thrown a lot of light on the problem. We must recall that only
since the war have we introduced dynamical methods into forecasting for short
periods ahead-before that time the data were not available on a regular daily
basis and ideas could not be developed.
Now I believe it is time for a real advance in the science of long-range
forecasting. I do not necessarily mean in the success of long-range forecasting
for we cannot estimate the chances of success until we have a clear idea of the
nature of the problem : this we may confidently hope to discover and, whether
or not we forecast on a routine basis by any method, I feel that effort should
go into systematic analysis. We already know that abnormalities over long
periods are reflections of anomalies in the general circulation of the atmosphere.
We need to describe these anomalies coherently and then to study them
scientifically as dynamical and thermodynamical problems and I think one
way ahead is clear enough. By smoothing the data or by filtering it should be
possible to determine the scales in space and time of the significant variations
from long period averages. A lot of work on these lines will be done in the

168
Meteorological Office and Mr. Craddock is already prepared with programmes
for the electronic computer which we now have available.
Preliminary work suggests that after we leave behind the large variations
due to passing synoptic disturbances there is a gap in the spectrum followed by a
maximum of variability due to features on a time scale of about a month.
The space scale is also very large and it seems likely that we shall be able to
define and study the anomaly changes ' synoptically '. Once the variations
can be coherently and quantitatively described there is every reason to be
confident that physical explanations will follow. I therefore regard long-range
forecasting as the most attractive and possibly the most productive line of
advance open to us in the immediate future.
Briefly then the foreseeable future of weather forecasting may be something
as follows. With growing wealth and growing recognition of the value of
forecasting, countries will provide all the observational data which forecasting
services can reasonably demand. Automatic observing and reporting, much
more rapid communications, automatic electronic recording, storing and pro-
cessing of data, automatic charting if required and electronic calculation of the
forecasts will very greatly reduce the repetitive routine work, which is not to be
deplored, and will also reduce the exercise of subjective scientific judgment,
which is unfortunate, for the exercise of expert judgment is among the most
satisfying of mental activities. Forecasts will become somewhat more accurate
but there is no sign of any revolutionary advance in precision. Long-range
forecasting for weeks or even a month or two ahead is likely to be more widely
and successfully practised, giving useful indications of broad trends. Fore-
casts of climatic trends over decades or even centuries are not out of the question.
A great widening in the range of applied forecasting t o industry, agriculture,
transport and recreation, with a lessening in the dominance of aviation, will
bring new and lasting interest to the profession, new scope for the exercise of
expert judgment to compensate for the loss as prediction itself becomes stereo-
typed and objective.

FIELD STUDY. COURSES IN METEOROLOGY

The Royal Meteorological Society is prepared to consider applications for
financial assistance in attending Field Study Courses in Meteorology from those
who have grants from no other source.
Attention is drawn to the course at Malham Tarn on Meteorology, from
19-26 August 1959; the course at Dale Fort on Oceanography, from 26 August
to 2 September 1959; and the course at Preston Montford on MeteorologL and
Flight, from 19-26 September 1959.
Details can be obtained from the Assistant Secretary.
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