6. Weather Modelling

When you watch the weather forecast on TV you will see the presenters telling you what the weather will be like that day, that evening, tomorrow or even later in the week.

But, they can't know 100% for sure, because the time hasn't actually happened yet. What you are watching is their prediction about what they think will happen in the future.

However, their predictions are usually pretty accurate. This is because data has been collected over many decades about temperatures, wind speeds, humidity, air pressure etc.

Meterologists (people who study the weather) can look at a set of data for a given time. They can then look at what happened to the weather over the next few hours/days.

This has enabled accurate models to be built.

So when they see that the temperature at 6am is 10 degrees C, and the wind speed is 20 miles per hour blowing from the north and the air pressure is 980, they can run that data through the model and get a prediction about what the weather will probably be like for the rest of the day.