Storm Warning: America's Earth Science · Episode 7 of 12 · 35 min
The Models: How We Learned to See the Future
Inside NOAA's labs, weather and climate became mathematics. A generation of scientists turned forecasting from educated guesswork into a reliable five-day prediction, and a lab in New Jersey built the physical climate models that earned Syukuro Manabe a Nobel Prize. The episode covers Doppler radar, hurricane aircraft, Pacific buoys and the weather balloons every forecast depends on.
Who's who
- Syukuro ManabeClimate modeler at GFDL and 2021 Nobel laureate
- Joseph SmagorinskyFounding director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
- Edward LorenzMIT meteorologist who showed small errors amplify, the butterfly effect
- Klaus HasselmannOceanographer and 2021 Nobel co-laureate
- Richard WetheraldCo-author of Manabe's 1967 radiative-convective model
Where it happens
- Princeton, New Jersey+2 more episodesHome of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory since 1968
- Norman, OklahomaSite of the National Severe Storms Laboratory
- Miami, FloridaHome of the National Hurricane Center
- Seattle, Washington+7 more episodesHome of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
- Tropical Pacific OceanWhere the TAO buoy array measures El Niño
Timeline
- 1958Manabe joins the Weather Bureau's research laboratory in Washington
- 1963Lorenz publishes 'Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow'
- 1967Manabe and Wetherald publish their CO2 model
- 1973Doppler radar observes a tornado's full life cycle for the first time
- 1985Construction begins on the TAO buoy array after the 1982-83 El Niño
- October 5, 2021Manabe and Hasselmann share half of the Nobel Prize in Physics
Still debated
Lorenz's chaos theory sets a theoretical limit on weather prediction, though AI models show surprising skill. Rapid hurricane intensification remains largely unsolved, and El Niño forecasts beyond six months have improved only modestly.