A Trip To Fantasy IslandAdded : Thursday at 14:30 Ahh Fantasy Island... If you say to most people that there is snow in Fantasy Island then you might be thinking that it's about to snow in the Maldives, or perhaps Fantasy Island is in the Arctic?
But say that to a meteorologist and you'll usually get the reply "Oh really? So what?"
Fantasy Island isn't a place, there are no all inclusive flights there or pina coladas being served in an infinity pool. But for meteorologists Fantasy Island is somewhere we check in every so often, but that's it, we just check in, take a look, then leave.
Here is Fantasy Island :-
To explain this, we need to go back a few years when the GFS ► weather model used to run out to 192 hours ahead. After that, the model would open a bottle of scotch (Ed. Really?!) then drop resolution and timeframe in order to complete the run out to T+384, or 384 hours ahead.
It was sometimes a rather comical time. Charts would be thrown at you that would leave you spitting coffee, or scotch, over the huge computer monitors we had.
Fantasy Island had a way of making you believe that the chart was possible. You would raise your hopes looking at the mouth-watering colours as the GFS ► threw an Arctic pipeline down across the UK covering it in snow, only to have your hopes dashed six hours later on the next run.
These days, the GFS ► runs at high resolution right out to T+384. But Fantasy Island still exists thanks to the chaos theory and the fact that it probably still cracks open the scotch once it gets to T+240.
Sometimes, the GFS ► will pick up on trends, but these need to be backed up by the ensembles before we give them any weight. From early next year, the GFS ► ensembles will go right out to T+840, that's 35 days ahead!
Fantasy Island is alive and well and thanks to a variety of limitations with weather forecasting and numerical modelling. Scotch on the other hand is real and rather nice.
METEOROLOGIST : ONTHEROCKS |