Weather Forecast [closed]

Question

I am working on an experimental weather station that has a minimal set of sensors:

• GPS (which gives me the location, date and time);

• Thermometer (which gives me the air temperature);

• Barometer (which gives me atmospheric pressure);

• Rain Detector (which indicates if it is raining or not);

• Ultraviolet sensor (which gives me the intensity of UV rays)

Basically, the system reads all these sensors simultaneously, with a 5 minute interval between readings and sends the samples to a remote database.

Is it possible to use the history of this information to make some kind of weather forecast?

Answer 1

As @Erik notes, the answer to your question is vacuously "yes".

Digging a little deeper, we can break this into two questions:

• Given the vast amount of weather data available (http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/10154/sources-of-weather-data/10155), is it possible to find correlations (either linear or non-linear) between known data such as latitude, longitude, elevation, time, previous weather (temperature, pressure, etc) and current weather? Of course, your interest is in correlating present conditions to future conditions, but, since we're looking at existing data, this is the same as correlation past conditions to present conditions.

• If such correlations exist, can we use them to predict future weather?

The answer to the first question is definitely yes: there necessarily exists a mathematical function that will convert any finite amount of known data and past conditions to present conditions. However, this mathematical function may be extremely complicated and completely useless for future predictions.

The answer to the second question is "maybe". We can limit ourselves to "simple" correlations derived from a given set of data and then test our correlations against out of band data (ie, data not used to create the correlations), or, better still, to make and test actual predictions.

Since correlation doesn't imply causation and past performance doesn't imply future performance, there's no guarantee that this will work.

In some sense, the following questions ask essentially the same question:

• Deserts and Humidity

• Precipitation and Elevation

• Is there any link between the weekly human cycle and weather? (using weekday as an input variable)

• Local Weather Forecast (Self-Learning Algorithm)

• Statistical weather prediction

• Predicting school closures with historical weather prediction data? (using school closure as an output variable)

• How does elevation affect the amount of rainfall received?

• Predicting the weather in two months

• Weather forecast based on pressure, temperature and humidity only (for implementation in Arduino) (which notes the "Zambretti algorithm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambretti_Forecaster) is one existing correlation/forecasting algorithm)

• Is it typically colder after a storm?

and probably a few others.

I think this would make an interesting project, but I don't know to what extent anyone has pursued this. If anyone wants to pursue it more deeply, feel free to contact me directly (contact info in profile).