Chaos in the Atmosphere

Abstract

The conclusion of this book cannot escape the aspect of atmospheric physics that is most debated nowadays, that is, the chaotic character of the climatic system and the atmosphere. In the previous chapters we have not questioned the deterministic character of this system and most of the time we have worked with equations for which analytical solutions existed that enabled us to predict at each instant of time the status of the system. These were relatively simple systems that implied a total predictability. Sometimes more complex systems do no give rise to the same conclusions or to regular solutions. The atmosphere could be such a system and, according to Edward Lorenz, it may be intrinsically unpredictable. You may think about a cloud: today there is no theory that could predict the evolution of a cloud in the presence of updraft, wind, humidity advection, etc. There are no two identical clouds, nonetheless we know that at the base of clouds evolution there are processes that could be described and understood. If we think a little, this is not a novel situation in physics. In a completely different context, the kinetic theory of gases solves another impossible problem because avoids the question of how to describe the exact position of each molecule in a gas. Instead it gives their collective properties, describing their statistical behavior.