Having worked in hydrology (in forecasting) for a year out of college -- yeah -- you might as well use tea leaves and Tarot cards. People can't even predict weather. Let alone: Snowpack + weather.
5 billion gallons / 9350 km² is just 2mm. If that fell in one hour, the flow into the lake would be 5200 m³/s, except it would be lower since it takes time for the water to reach the lake.
The normal flow of the spillway is 4200 m³/s.
Have I done something wrong here, or missed something obvious? 2mm/hr is a pretty moderate rain.
Things get iffy once you have heavy rain for long enough that the soil saturates.
We've gotten a lot better on timing with better satellite data. But so far as precip amounts, and type? Let's just say it is not the exact science we want it to be.
Now we have powerful computers and lots of data freely available (well maybe less now thanks to Trump), I've always dreamed of running an old computer model say from the 1980s at home.
A: Weather and climate are not the same. Weather is individual, day-to-day atmospheric events; climate is the statistical average of those events. Weather is short-term and chaotic and is thus inherently unpredictable beyond a few days. Climate is long-term average weather and is controlled by larger forces, such as the composition of the atmosphere, and is thus more predictable on longer timescales. For the same reasons, a cold winter in one region does not disprove global warming.
As an analogy, while it is impossible to predict the age at which any particular man will die, we can say with high confidence that the average age of death for men in industrialized countries is about 75. The individual is analogous to weather, whereas the statistical average is analogous to climate.
To use the human lifespan argument, yes we can say the average lifespan for men is 75, but that's looking backwards. How good would we be at predicting future life expectancy? I'd say we're probably pretty bad at it.
Also, yes, we're trying to predict the average temperature of the earth with climate models. However, that average is determined by the climate in a number of different areas.
Someone please explain this to me.
You ask "how good are we at predicting future life expectancy?"
Unfortunately I can't do an analysis right now, so hopefully this qualitative discussion will help answer it for you.
If you look at historical life expectancy, grouped by cohort, you'll see a relatively smooth function with easily identifiable trends. So, group everybody into the year they were born, and graph their average lifespan.
Past trends do not guarantee future performance, however a smooth function implies an underlying order to these observations. This is the core thesis everything else stems from then; we assume there is a relationship between the year someone was born, and their average lifespan.
Now a function relating just the year they were born to their average lifespan is almost certainly too simplistic. Where they were born, their socioeconomic status, and so much more will affect that number. The problem we have is that many of these parameters are hidden to us. Even worse, we can't even say for sure what all the parameters are! What we can do, however, is estimate the effect of these parameters, and even estimate the effect of parameters we don't know exist.
This process is inherently fuzzy, as statistics and modelling from less than perfect knowledge must be, but the models that have been created have proved to have great predictive power. The existence and general profitability of the life insurance industry is evidence to that.
We use models all the time, and for the most part this goes unquestioned. Regardless of your model of the sun and planets, it better predict the sun rising tomorrow, or else it's got some pretty big gaps. If someone told you they predicted the sun would not rise tomorrow, you'd be rightfully discredulous. But you'd be as equally discredulous if someone told you it was impossible to predict the future, so we really don't know if the sun will come up or not.
We test our models on their predictive power. Even if our models were bad, we don't simply throw them away because they are not perfect. We work to refine them and make them more accurate. Asimov's essay on the relativeness of 'wrong' is well worth the read.
So, life expectancy is a decent model, and is constantly being improved upon as we learn more about the world. Something may come along and cause us all to die, or live forever, but that remote possibility is no reason to throw our hands in the air and say the whole exercise is pointless.
Similarly, our climate models may be inaccurate or not account for some unknown future event, but that is not a reason to stop refining them, nor a reason to say "we can't know the future so this is pointless."
I understand that you can model something and constantly improve it, but that still doesn't inspire confidence in the model's predictive ability.
Maybe a better answer would be: "Yes, weather forecasts are often wrong, but climate modeling from 10 years ago accurately predicted today's global temperatures with a margin of error of +/- 0.5%."
ofc, answering the question as well would still be useful.
To the specific example of the sun rising - for the sun to stop rising, the earth has to either become tidally locked about the sun, or the earth or sun must be destroyed.
One article[0] says:
Scientists have reliable data on the Earth's rotational speed, based on observations of the sun's position in the sky during solar eclipses, going back some 2,500 years. Although the rotational rate hasn't declined smoothly, over that period the average day has grown longer by between 15 millionths and 25 millionths of a second every year. Even at the faster rate, it will take 140 million years before the Earth's rotation slows enough to necessitate a 25-hour day.
The real crux of this matter is predictive power. We can get a rough understanding of the predictive power of a model by asking the question "at what point does the expected error in our prediction make that prediction meaningless?" For example, how accurate does a population model need to be for us to be willing to use it to predict population distribution in 50 years? It's fair enough to say that our models are not capable of predicting the population distribution in 1 million years, but no model could and it's unlikely we would be able to utilise such a prediction even if it were made.
As I said before, the existence of a profitable life insurance industry is evidence that we are good at making lifespan predictions at the individual level, in aggregate. Every time a policy is written, it's like a wager is being made between the insured and the insurer. Yes the insurers lose some bets, and some years they may even lose a lot of them, but it's clear that the odds are stacked in their favour, for otherwise they would be unable to offer insurance at all.
If you were to bet on what the climate of this planet will look like next year, how would you make your prediction? If you were to offer odds, how would you structure the book to make sure you win?
Yes, the absolute accuracy of climate models is going to diminish over the next 1, 5, 10 years, so the error associated with a specific global average temperature prediction (for example) will increase. That doesn't mean the actual temperature is just going to fluctuate wildly! Next year the global average temperature may decrease. It is extremely unlikely that in 10 years time the average temperature will have decreased, even if there is drastic intervention. Any bookmaker looking to make a profit would be offering odds on how much the temperate increases, not merely on if it increased or not.
Yes, predictive power is going to decrease as time goes on. No, that doesn't mean models are useless, nor that we can't have predictions that become more likely as time goes on.
[0] http://www.popsci.com/jessica-cheng/article/2008-09/ive-hear...
The fact that businesses selling life insurance make money over the aggregate, despite sometimes losing money in the individual, seems to imply we're decently good at it.
The weather is a particular point on the twisted surface; it is impossible to calculate what point you'll reach at a given time, for reasons that you'll find in a search for "Lyapurnov exponent".
The climate is the butterfly shape. If you run the simulation with different parameters, you can look and see how this changes.
The Lorentz equations are much simpler than a realistic weather model, but the same principles apply to the complicated models, and to the laws of physics that the atmosphere actually follows.
What is missing in this nice analysis is the economic impact. If 200k were evacuated, and roughly estimating they have $100k in real estate each for housing, and say $50k each for business real estate in the flood risk area, that comes to $30B. Assuming some will not be a complete loss, say $15B in real estate loss if the emergency spillway fails (neglecting job and economic activity impacts, etc).
Now if you have a 5% chance of failure in this next storm, the expected value of the loss is $750M.
This value now can be used to decide how much effort should be put into emergency repairs, something less than $750M.
Say these numbers are in the ballpark. Is the emergency repair effort taking place sensible? I suspect not. To avoid a loss in the billions, you'd expect a bigger effort. I'd expect every shotcrete contractor in the western US on hand, rebar being placed by helicopter, steel beams, 50 pieces of heavy equipment, temporary tanks of diesel fuel, and a real sense of emergency. Not seeing it.
Main point is to make an appropriate effort. Seems not too bad today, and think the storm isn't huge.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-live-updates-orov...
Shotcrete and concrete are difficult to place via helicopter. Both need to be pumped (or hand placed) to get a good product, which can't be done via helicopter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Alberta_floods#Meteorolog...
The timespan we used in the SQL query calculates the inflow/precipitation ratio based on the last few weeks and we use that as an input into the estimate.
This guy seems to have testified about this flooding damage and claims 30 inches of rain around Oroville, with 18 inches of coincident melting, thus exceeding their worst-case scenario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_fOdaNTppI&feature=youtu.be...
Approximate watershed is seen in the map at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather_River
We see the same thing in NOAA's regional snow analysis maps: https://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/?region=Sierras
Outflow rates should have an associated catastrophic failure probability estimate
The emergency spillway was originally rated for 350,000 cfs (cubic feet per second), but when it came into use, the erosion started causing a risk of catastrophic failure at just 6,000 - 12,000 cfs (this is what prompted the evacuation order, and the re-opening of the primary spillway to its capacity).The catastrophic failure probability estimates simply haven't stood up to real-world testing.