I had some fun with Google Gemini today. I wanted to illustrate how weather forecasts become uncertain after a few days due to the butterfly effect. This occurs because we can never be completely sure of what we call the initial conditions: the state of the weather, ocean, sea ice, etc. at the time when we create the forecast. By varying these initial conditions slightly and running the forecast multiple times, they will start out more or less identical but then diverge after a few days.
I wanted to illustrate this with an analogy. It is impossible to accurately predict how water will flow down a stream because there are multiple obstacles along the way. For instance, if there is a rock somewhere, we can’t know if the water will flow to the left or right of the obstacle. I instructed Gemini to illustrate this, and here’s what it came up with:
Pretty awesome if you ask me. The next step was to illustrate how this could look for an ensemble of temperature forecasts for a given location. I asked Gemini to emphasize how the individual ensemble members gradually diverge. Here’s the result (after some back and forth):
That’s it. Now I’m ready to explain this concept to the students at our upcoming CATER school in Madagascar next week.
Erik Kolstad 