 |
| PHÎÒÎ: UNIAN |
All summer long, Ukraine has experienced waves of unbearable heat and heavy rains. Metro stations in Kyiv are being flooded while the western parts of the country suffer from natural disasters. Poland was hit even harder. But nobody seems to have drawn the right conclusions from these acts of God so far
5-year plan for 4 years
When talking about the weather, the word ‘unprecedented’ demonstrates a lack of awareness of the average citizen and the government about the current climate changes. If you google up for “heavy rains, floods and Europe”, you will be see that people are obviously suffering from memory loss.
Such disasters have happened in the past and seem to be repeating with increasing frequency. In 1997, rain showers that hit Europe were really unprecedented in the observable past. In Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Germany rivers overflowed their banks, more than 200 people have drowned as tens of thousands were rescued from their destroyed homes.
In 2002 Europe was again hit by floods that killed two hundred people and incurred losses of US $19.57 billion; in 2006 another two hundred people were killed severe flooding. Another four years went by and history is repeating itself...
And (surprise, surprise!) another disastrous summer set in, strictly by the schedule. Little wonder. We are a part of Europe.
 |
| PHÎÒÎ: AP |
Typhoon in Kyiv
The climate on the European continent has always been influenced by the sea with mild winters and cool summers. In such conditions, urban sewage systems easily coped with heavy precipitations. Only after the third continental flood, European scientists finally figured out what exactly went wrong in the weather kitchen of the Old World.
European weather is formed over the Atlantic and blown to the continent by western winds. But something went wrong with the winds. Earlier, they blew like trained restaurant waiters: fast and accurately delivering to all European countries rain and snow in equal portions. However, at the end of the 20th century something began to change and the winds began to change and started to behave like drunken garcons who bring the trays . Today, these winds are unpredictable.
Over the past 150 years the average temperature on the planet increased by 0.6 °C. At the same time, at the poles temperatures have risen by more than 1°C, while at the equator they haven’t changed. Due to this, the speed of winds blowing from north to south and vice versa has decreased, the air in the atmosphere is not mixing as well and winds from the Atlantic have weakened.
When these winds were blowing steadily and strongly, they brought clouds all the way to the Ural Mountains in Russia, evenly sewing them over the entire European continent. Today, these clouds are completely emptying themselves of Atlantic water over Western, Southern and Central Europe.
But the story does not end here. As soon as the power of winds subsided, anticyclones and cyclones began rotating less frequently. Earlier, the routine Atlantic anti-cyclone carrying snow and heat in the winter and rain and cool temperatures in the summer hit Europe every three to six days. Today, the breaks between them drag on for several weeks. As a result, the summer months are stifling hot and winters are frosty without thaws. When the weather changes, it does so dramatically and is accompanied by typhoons and hurricanes that earlier Europe never experienced.
It got to the point where scientists began assigning female names to European storms, just as they have been doing with hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea for years. For example, the hurricane with a wind speed of 160 km/h that swept through Western Europe in 2002 was named Janet (in honor of the most destructive hurricane Janet in the Gulf of Mexico in 1955). And last week a tornado ripped over the island of Helgoland and just like in Kansas threw eight Germans into the air and then slammed them into the ground with such force that they were taken to the emergency ward at the local hospital.
Forecast from the Pentagon
The floods are clear for scientists. But for the uneducated public two questions remain unanswered.
The first is quite simple. Why did it happen now? The answer is that after the Atlantic winds weakened, sooner or later this was bound to happen and it did.
The second question is more complicated. Can the next flood be predicted a month, a week or a day in advance? If a meteorologist responded "yes", this is a lie. If the answer is "no", people will ask why? Answering this third question is extremely challenging for scientists.
As long as a time machine does not exist, scientists can only predict the future by extrapolation. Scientists have drawn a curve representing weather patterns in the past. If this curve takes an upswing, then it continues to rise. If it goes down, it continues to do so.
In order to predict weather, hundreds of such curves are needed. These curves represent wind strength, its direction, the altitude of clouds, thickness of the cloud layer, atmospheric pressure, air, land and water temperatures, etc. These curves are all interrelated and very complex and multifaceted. To calculate where exactly the curves meet takes more than just a computer. It requires a supercomputer.
Only the U.S. military has such supercomputers. It donated three of them to weather forecasting agencies in Washington, Melbourne and Moscow, where experts calculate and predict the weather all over the planet. The forecasts provided on TV, radio and Internet are merely projections, fragments of the main forecasts or a local variation and sometimes even a fantasy.
Mathematicians have proven that accurate weather forecasts can be made for a period of no more than three weeks. This is the theoretical limit of predictability of atmospheric processes. If the term of the forecast is more than three weeks, no scientist or meteorologist will vouch for it.
Of course, browsing the Internet one can find forecasts for any period of time and governments of CIS countries according to old Soviet habit require their Hidrometsenter (National Weather Forecast Center) to make predictions every six months in the spring before planting of crops and in the fall before the heating season begins. But these forecasts have nothing to do with the science of studying climates.
Flood of 2014
Since the late 1960s, when weather forecasters gained access to the first military supercomputers, they learned how to make a forecast only five days in advance. In addition to that, these computers were not powerful enough. The probability of an accurate forecast was 63-68%. A forecast for a day is more accurate at close to 90%.
To achieve such outstanding results, scientists had to create a mathematical model of the global climate. The supercomputer makes such calculations based on this model. It took thirty years for the scientists in the world of meteorology to design such a model. When they finally created, tested, refined, re-tested and put into operation this model, it became obsolete and totally unneeded. Just think, thirty years of studying the science of rain patters went “down the gutter”, pardon the pun, and now it will take another thirty years to build a new model.
But there is good news. While earlier Ukrainians drowned according to their own schedule, now this schedule is fully coordinated with the European schedule of floods at the highest atmospheric levels. The weather has become truly European. According to this indicator, Ukraine can boldly be regarded as an associate member of the European Union and the Cabinet of Ministers can now begin saving money on cleaning up the aftermath of the next European flood in 2014.
As for the current forecasts of tornadoes in Poltava and typhoons in Kyiv, they will only come in 2040. After all, science also has limitations of its possibilities.
Printable version
