Question: Hi! How do you find out what the weather is going to be like apart from using satellite images?

Kate Winfield answered on 18 Nov 2019:

In order to know what the weather will do in the future, we first need to know accurately what it is doing now. Recordings of weather variables are made 24 hours a day across the globe. These are passed to the world’s major weather forecasting centres and used in conjunction with satellite images to get a picture of what the atmosphere is doing now. These are called observations. Observations also include aircraft data, radar data, marine data and atmospheric research. The weather forecasting centres have huge supercomputers, which use these observations as ‘starting conditions’ for very complex equations which can predict where the weather will move, and how it will evolve as time goes on. The computer models are run several times a day, and meteorologists work through the clock to check that the forecast is going to plan.