49. Weather Forecasts

This episode of Freakonomics Radio delves into the complex world of weather forecasting, its economic impact, and technological advancements.

1. Weather forecasting has a profound impact on multiple industries, including transportation and agriculture.
2. Technological advancements have significantly improved the accuracy of weather predictions over the years.
3. The integration of AI and supercomputers has enhanced the ability to detect complex weather patterns.
4. Climate change introduces new challenges in forecasting, as historical data becomes less reliable.
5. Economic activities and safety protocols heavily rely on accurate and timely weather forecasts.

1. Introduction to Weather Forecasting

Zachary Crockett introduces the topic and its relevance across various industries. Discusses the economic stakes involved in accurate weather forecasting. Zachary Crockett: "Weather forecasts influence decisions in industries like live events and agriculture."

2. The Role of Technology in Forecasting

Detailed discussion on the evolution of meteorological tools and the role of AI in enhancing prediction accuracy. Peter Neely: "AI tools have spotted patterns that might elude human meteorologists."

3. Impact of Climate Change

Exploration of how climate change complicates weather forecasting, making historical data unreliable. Peter Neely: "Climate change affects the predictability of weather events, altering traditional forecasting models."

4. Economic Implications

Examination of the direct economic impacts of weather forecasting on various sectors. Zachary Crockett: "Accurate weather predictions are crucial for economic activities and planning."

1. Always check updated weather forecasts to plan events.
2. Utilize advanced weather apps for real-time updates.
3. Understand the limitations of forecasts, especially with ongoing climate changes.
4. For industries reliant on weather, invest in advanced forecasting technologies.
5. Regularly update emergency plans to account for faster onset of severe weather due to climate change.

With industries relying on them and profits to be made, weather forecasts are more precise and more popular than ever. But there are clouds on the horizon. Zachary Crockett grabs an umbrella.

People

Peter Neely, Steve Adelman

Companies

The Weather Company

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

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Zachary Crockett
Last August, more than 50,000 people made their way to a stadium in the suburbs outside of Washington, DC. They were there to see Beyonce during her Renaissance world tour, but Mother Nature wasn't making it easy. There was a stormfront rolling in. People were waiting outside. The organizer said, you don't want to go out to the seats where you're exposed to lightning strikes.

Steve Adelman
Stay in the concourse. That's Steve Adelman, vice president of the event Safety alliance. He's a sports and entertainment lawyer who works on live events, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how things could go wrong. His biggest concern is usually the weather. The organizers of the Beyonce concert, the only thing they didn't account for is that on a hot, steamy August night in the DC area, putting thousands upon thousands of people in the concourses becomes a health and safety disaster because people got dehydrated and started fainting in the concourses.

Zachary Crockett
Edelman works in just one of the many industries that hinge on weather live. Event planners, airlines, retailers, farmers, they all have to plan ahead and make weather related decisions because as it turns out, theres a lot at stake.

Steve Adelman
When is the storm likely to arrive? What is the nature of the storm? The downside risk of leaving everyone in harms way when theres lightning in the forecast is extremely bad. For the freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

Zachary Crockett
Today, weather forecasts. From the time he was eight years old, Peter neely knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up. You'll see this kind of thing time and time again for those in our profession. They were five years old and they saw a tornado at their grandmother's house or they experienced a big blizzard and they just sort of knew it. Young Peter Neely was right.

He's now director of weather forecasting sciences and technologies for the weather company. We're probably best known by some of our brands, like the Weather Channel, Weather.com comma, weather underground. Predicting the weather requires a number of skills. First of all, fundamentally understanding the physics of how things work. Like hot air rises, well, how much will it rise and how quickly will it rise?

Peter Neely
How does a raindrop form? Will it stay in the cloud, or will it fall out of the cloud and become precipitation? That's all sort of governed by details of what we call the cloud physics. We then can embody those details of the physics in algorithms that describe the evolution of the atmosphere based on a current state of the atmosphere.

Zachary Crockett
To start, meteorologists read the current state of the atmosphere from a huge host of observational tools that continually record data. Weve had instruments to measure humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure for more than 500 years, but it wasnt until the 19th century that organized weather observation networks were formed across the United States. Over the following decades, tools like the telegraph, the radio, sand, and radar allowed meteorologists to collect a wide range of data and detect patterns that could create a forecast. By the 1940s, it started to become clear that making accurate predictions required a lot of fast calculations, making it the perfect task for a computer. And over the last 75 years, since the advent of supercomputers, they've just incrementally gotten better and better.

Supercomputers digest all that data and feed it into algorithmic models crafted by scientists. The meteorologists then interpret the output to predict what is most likely to happen next in our atmosphere. The precision by which we can run these models increases as there's more computer capacity going on. The science that's in the models gets better. And so our forecasts have gotten better by about a day per decade.

Peter Neely
And what that means is the forecast for five days in advance today is about as accurate as the forecast for three days in advance 20 years ago. That improvement has meant good business for Neely and his colleagues. In 2023, a morning consult survey put the weather company in the top ten most trusted brands, alongside Ups and Kleenex. It serves more than 300 million people each month through its digital properties alone, and it was recently acquired by a private equity firm for more than a billion dollars, there's a good chance. If you're watching the 06:00 news tonight, you're seeing a weather show, which is largely produced by the weather company, or at least using the technologies and data from the weather company.

Zachary Crockett
Yet when it comes to predictions, even the weather company can't account for everything. We fundamentally don't know the temperature 5 miles above the ground out over the South Pacific Ocean right now, we can make a good guess of it, but we fundamentally don't know it and well never be able to know what the temperature and the precipitation, the moisture and everything is at every place all the time. There's just this little gap between how good we are now and the theoretical limit to how good we ever could be. Lots of folks are trying to narrow this gap. But can they?

That's coming up.

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No matter what stage youre in. Shopify.com everydaythings interest in the weather has never been greater, which means theres money to be made. The global market for forecasting services has recently been valued at over $2 billion. That includes things like subscriptions, apps, advertising revenue from weather stations, and special weather services purchased by businesses. Wall street has taken an interest in weather too.

Theres now a $25 billion market built around buying and selling weather derivatives. Basically bets on future weather patterns within a certain period of time. Yet up until the last decade, the mightiest tools for gathering weather data like satellite and radar systems belonged mainly to government agencies. The weather companys. Peter Neely says thats been changing.

Peter Neely
Increasingly in the last ten years or so, there's been an advent of commercial enterprises deploying their own weather observing equipment. And oftentimes it's some new technique that will provide us a different way to observe or learn some more about what the atmosphere is. Private companies have been able to launch satellites into space to measure atmospheric conditions, all because the cost of doing so has dropped significantly over the last few decades, from hundreds of millions of dollars to around 5 million. In some cases, all those satellites have been contributing mountains of additional data, which helps increase the accuracy of forecasts. For these companies, the cost is worth it.

A study a couple decades ago estimated that over 30% of the total us economy is dependent on the weather in some form or other. You know, agriculture foundationally dependent on the weather. Transportation is disrupted by weather events a lot. Construction onward and onward. There's a lot of ingrained dependency in the weather.

Zachary Crockett
Few fields are more dependent on weather forecasting than the aviation industry, where expensive decisions are made on a minute by minute basis. Certainly at the weather company, we have meteorologists who are embedded inside some of the major airlines around the country, sitting next to dispatchers and helping them make decisions. For example, should we put a little bit more fuel on this flight because when the flight gets to New York, there might be thunderstorms in the area, which will cause the flight to need to circle around for a little bit because of delays of arrivals into the airport. And if we put a little bit more fuel on that flight, the chances that it might actually need to be diverted to an alternative airport go down. When it comes to the airlines, its easy to see the value of ever more precise weather predictions.

So forecasters find ways to measure how confident they can be in their forecasts. One big factor is whats known as atmospheric stability, which is notoriously hard to measure. Yeah, that gets a bit tricky and it has to do with the chaotic nature of our atmosphere. When it's unstable, little differences at the beginning translate into big differences at the end. The thunderstorm is a representation of a very unstable atmosphere, and so if we don't get the temperatures exactly right, we may not know whether or not the atmosphere is going to be stable or unstable.

According to the National oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 1980, the US has seen 383 weather events, with damages exceeding a billion dollars. And so meteorologists are increasingly turning to another tool to help individuals and businesses try to make better decisions. When it comes to weather, artificial intelligence. Has hit the scene only in the last two or three years or so, and the progress has been nothing short of stunning. AI tools have been able to spot patterns that might elude human meteorologists.

In some cases, AI can do this before anyone even understands the underlying science. A study was published late last year on an AI powered weather prediction model built by Google, which outperformed government models that have existed for decades. There's so much enthusiasm for how much this approach can bring to our ability to forecast weather.

A new factor, however, is making prediction harder, and it's one that AI and supercomputers can't fully account for. Climate change forecasts that rely on historical data can struggle as the atmosphere becomes more unstable than ever before. Last year, insurance marketplace Lloyds of London said that global economic losses due to extreme weather events could top $700 billion in the next five years. Every professional meteorologist has told us it's harder to make an accurate prediction because the models are all based on historical data, but the historical data is based on pre climate change circumstances. Again, thats live events.

Steve Adelman
Attorney Steve Adelman storms rise faster now than they used to. They become more violent more quickly now than they used to, and so even the weather trigger charts that we rely on to say, all right, we have 30 minutes to evacuate the house before the storm arises. That 30 minutes may now be 27 minutes because of climate change. Temporary structures generally have wind ratings, but they were designed for a different climatic world than the one that we're living in now. Despite all of this chaos, the amazing thing is that weather forecasting is more accurate than ever.

Zachary Crockett
And in general, you can feel confident that the weather youll encounter on an average day will look a lot like what your weather app predicts. As long as you dont expect 100% certainty.

Peter Neely
Whatever my family asks me about what the weather forecast is, I always give them the standard answer. Partly cloudy chance of showers.

Zachary Crockett
For the economics of everyday things im Zachary Krob. This episode was produced by Julie Kanfer and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rabson.

Peter Neely
Are the clouds 1000ft above the ground or 2000ft above the ground. It's just clouds to us.

Zachary Crockett
The Freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything.

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