Let us explore alternative ideas about the causes of the extremes of weather and climate. Are we creating our own weather reality? According to Quantum Mechanics, "the action of measurement changes the state of a physical system". This is derived from the superposition principle and "the Schrodinger's cat paradox", i.e., a cat put in a box with a radioactive element is both dead and alive until someone opens the box. This is to mean that the state of the cat is the superposition of the two states "death" and "life". Whether the superposition is linear or non-linear doesn't matter here. The presence of a radioactive material may favor more of death state than alive, so that the superposition sways towards the other end. Then the question is, what is the action of opening? The action of opening collapses the state into one, either death or life and not the superposition of the two. Does the action of opeing the box result in the happenned state randomly or is it the belief, intention, or feeling of the person who opend the box that collpases the two state system in to one state system? "I felt the cat is dead and I opened the box, then the cat is dead". "I wanted the cat alive and opened the box and the cat is alive". " I believed the cat is alive, and then there was the cat alive". Can all this be interpreted as the "action of measurement", or "action of opening the box" which collapsed the two state system into one?
The superposition of states may be applicable to the microscopic quantum world but since the larger systems like weather and climate are composed of smaller and microscopic systems, the same principle may be valid. So, with the same analogy as the cat-paradox above, the weather systems are the superposition of two or more states. For example, the next hour weather is the superposition of rain and dry (no rain) atmosphere. So, some one letting us know that there will be a --% chance of rain is altering the state to one state? Is this person, then responsible for the new state? According to the superposition principle, yes, the person is responsible for the new atmospheric state.
There was an established belief system in our town and the surrounding villages. When the weather used to get dry people pray for rains. Or sometimes they used to go to special people, they identified them by the name "chamsitu" ("caamistu" in Oromo). They believed that these "special" people could control the weather and climate system. I happened to visit one of these men with my grandmother when I was a child. I was totally absored in what this speical man was doing to tell us what was going to happen or according to him to alter the weather system to his desires. He went outside and observed the sky - he leaned towards all directions and carefully examined the sky. Then prayer followed. It was dry but to our surprise it rained later in the evening exactly as he had predicted. So, my grandmother told me that these pepople could contorl the weather. Nevertheless, I kept asking why he observed the skies before his prayers, but nobody tried to give me answers at the time. People generally pay tribute to these special people, they even pay them money to force the weather system changed to their needs. For example, during summer, farmers pay them to bring rains; during wedding, they pay them to drive the rains away.
These "special" wo/men are not without problems. They are more than any one in fear of exremes of weather. Because when the weather is dry and crops fail, people tend to show anger and they make them responsible for the extremes. Sometimes they do even kill these "special" people - the witch hunt.
I was in a corn farm with my grandfather, and I asked him why Chamsitu's see the sky before prayers? He seems surprised at my questions. He told me that he learned some tricks on how to predict the climate and weather systems. I remember him telling me that the process of predicting weather is complex and they learned it over long time through experiences transferred from their fathers and forefathers. He thought me how to predict summer rains at the time for that particular location. He said if the clouds are developing from the west during summer, there is high chance that it rains. However, if the clouds are developing from the east, it doesn't rain. He said that it is because the wind from the east associated with the cloud formation is srong and the wind drives the rains away. He was telling me that observation is key to predicting the weather systems accurately. Later I learned that they observe the atmospheric circulation system to predict the local weather. Similarly, they do have ways to predict the climate system, based on seasonal observations. The characterstiscs of one season tells them the climate of the next season and so forth.
Analogously, one may ask, why prayers are required after observations? Is our actions, feelings, prayers something to do with the exact prediction of the atmospheric condition? Are the weather "alarmists" (as some people like to call them) the ones in control of the weather system? Many questions may arise considering the concepts of quantum superposition principle but I will leave that here and discuss the theme of this article.
Yes, we are responsible for creating our own weather and climate reality. It is because human built environments change the patterns of weather and climate. Urban regions are responsible for changes such as increasing temperature in urban centers, knowns as the urban heat island effects, increasing thunderstorms and precipitation over and downwind part of the cities, exacerbating pollution, and so forth. The consequences of human activities are not only related to the built urban surfaces but also chemical emissions from industries. Anthropogenic emissions are known to have caused the rise in global temperatures and pollution. It is believed that predicting the consequences of the above human actions then requires statistical and/or numerical techniques. Prediction or forecasting are not the only deliverables of the models. Rather the study of the causality and complex interactions of different processes and entities requires models that are based on well established scientific laws.
However, the construction of models starts with simplified scientific concepts and represent only a small portion of the processes. For example, in most models urban surfaces are still not represented and/or very simple non-representative parameterizations were followed. The same discrepancies are observed in other parameterizations such as microphysics, radiation, and so forth.
The questions is, can climate models that do not take urban areas into account predict the weather and climate system accurately? How uncertain are they without urban canopy models? The local weather is the result of the interactions of a complex system of synoptic, local and microscale processes and therefore, does ignoring the smaller scales really produce a relaible outputs? Are synoptic scales more important than the meso and microscales? These are the questions that this article tries to answer.
The local urban effects are warm urban centers due to 'anthropogenic heat emissions', heating created by higher urban traffic compared to rural, household heating, refrigeration, warm anthropgenic water relseases and so forth. Urban areas are associated with high energy consumption. These anthropogenic higher energy centers are known to have not only affect the local urban weather and climate but altering the large scale atmospheric processes such as altering the jet streams, distrorting large scale atmospheric circulations and affecting other relevant atmospheric processes. Studies demonstrated that ambient heat produced by a city's buildings and cars often gets lifted into the jet stream and affects temperatures in places far far away - for example, thousands of miles. While the local effects of urban surfaces were not considered in most of the past climate models, these are the main culprits for the global climate change - causing too warm in few places and too cold in others. The associated impacts of such large scale modifications by the local urban scale processes are altered hydrologic cycles creating drought and water storms in others. So, it is advisable to start working up from the microscale to mesoscale and further to the synoptic scale processes to accurately predict weather and climate.
The superposition of states may be applicable to the microscopic quantum world but since the larger systems like weather and climate are composed of smaller and microscopic systems, the same principle may be valid. So, with the same analogy as the cat-paradox above, the weather systems are the superposition of two or more states. For example, the next hour weather is the superposition of rain and dry (no rain) atmosphere. So, some one letting us know that there will be a --% chance of rain is altering the state to one state? Is this person, then responsible for the new state? According to the superposition principle, yes, the person is responsible for the new atmospheric state.
There was an established belief system in our town and the surrounding villages. When the weather used to get dry people pray for rains. Or sometimes they used to go to special people, they identified them by the name "chamsitu" ("caamistu" in Oromo). They believed that these "special" people could control the weather and climate system. I happened to visit one of these men with my grandmother when I was a child. I was totally absored in what this speical man was doing to tell us what was going to happen or according to him to alter the weather system to his desires. He went outside and observed the sky - he leaned towards all directions and carefully examined the sky. Then prayer followed. It was dry but to our surprise it rained later in the evening exactly as he had predicted. So, my grandmother told me that these pepople could contorl the weather. Nevertheless, I kept asking why he observed the skies before his prayers, but nobody tried to give me answers at the time. People generally pay tribute to these special people, they even pay them money to force the weather system changed to their needs. For example, during summer, farmers pay them to bring rains; during wedding, they pay them to drive the rains away.
These "special" wo/men are not without problems. They are more than any one in fear of exremes of weather. Because when the weather is dry and crops fail, people tend to show anger and they make them responsible for the extremes. Sometimes they do even kill these "special" people - the witch hunt.
I was in a corn farm with my grandfather, and I asked him why Chamsitu's see the sky before prayers? He seems surprised at my questions. He told me that he learned some tricks on how to predict the climate and weather systems. I remember him telling me that the process of predicting weather is complex and they learned it over long time through experiences transferred from their fathers and forefathers. He thought me how to predict summer rains at the time for that particular location. He said if the clouds are developing from the west during summer, there is high chance that it rains. However, if the clouds are developing from the east, it doesn't rain. He said that it is because the wind from the east associated with the cloud formation is srong and the wind drives the rains away. He was telling me that observation is key to predicting the weather systems accurately. Later I learned that they observe the atmospheric circulation system to predict the local weather. Similarly, they do have ways to predict the climate system, based on seasonal observations. The characterstiscs of one season tells them the climate of the next season and so forth.
Analogously, one may ask, why prayers are required after observations? Is our actions, feelings, prayers something to do with the exact prediction of the atmospheric condition? Are the weather "alarmists" (as some people like to call them) the ones in control of the weather system? Many questions may arise considering the concepts of quantum superposition principle but I will leave that here and discuss the theme of this article.
Yes, we are responsible for creating our own weather and climate reality. It is because human built environments change the patterns of weather and climate. Urban regions are responsible for changes such as increasing temperature in urban centers, knowns as the urban heat island effects, increasing thunderstorms and precipitation over and downwind part of the cities, exacerbating pollution, and so forth. The consequences of human activities are not only related to the built urban surfaces but also chemical emissions from industries. Anthropogenic emissions are known to have caused the rise in global temperatures and pollution. It is believed that predicting the consequences of the above human actions then requires statistical and/or numerical techniques. Prediction or forecasting are not the only deliverables of the models. Rather the study of the causality and complex interactions of different processes and entities requires models that are based on well established scientific laws.
However, the construction of models starts with simplified scientific concepts and represent only a small portion of the processes. For example, in most models urban surfaces are still not represented and/or very simple non-representative parameterizations were followed. The same discrepancies are observed in other parameterizations such as microphysics, radiation, and so forth.
The questions is, can climate models that do not take urban areas into account predict the weather and climate system accurately? How uncertain are they without urban canopy models? The local weather is the result of the interactions of a complex system of synoptic, local and microscale processes and therefore, does ignoring the smaller scales really produce a relaible outputs? Are synoptic scales more important than the meso and microscales? These are the questions that this article tries to answer.
The local urban effects are warm urban centers due to 'anthropogenic heat emissions', heating created by higher urban traffic compared to rural, household heating, refrigeration, warm anthropgenic water relseases and so forth. Urban areas are associated with high energy consumption. These anthropogenic higher energy centers are known to have not only affect the local urban weather and climate but altering the large scale atmospheric processes such as altering the jet streams, distrorting large scale atmospheric circulations and affecting other relevant atmospheric processes. Studies demonstrated that ambient heat produced by a city's buildings and cars often gets lifted into the jet stream and affects temperatures in places far far away - for example, thousands of miles. While the local effects of urban surfaces were not considered in most of the past climate models, these are the main culprits for the global climate change - causing too warm in few places and too cold in others. The associated impacts of such large scale modifications by the local urban scale processes are altered hydrologic cycles creating drought and water storms in others. So, it is advisable to start working up from the microscale to mesoscale and further to the synoptic scale processes to accurately predict weather and climate.
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