ThirstyFish

The peak time for fall foliage in New York City is mid to late October. This photograph was taken in Narrowsburg in Upstate New York about a week ago. Last weekend I was expecting fall to make its way South down to NYC. We got a winter storm instead: The earliest New York City one-inch snowfall since records began.

Did you ever complain of inaccurate weather forecasts? Although weather forecasts have become more accurate over the years, they still become very unreliable after a few days, unless patterns are relatively stable. That is because weather is mathematically chaotic; it is highly sensitive to minute perturbations in initial conditions. The smallest changes in atmospheric conditions leads to unpredictable variations in temperature, humidity, pressure etc.

Chaos Theory is a relatively new discovery. It was first described in the 1960's by the American mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Norton Lorenz. Since then, many dynamic systems have been found to have chaotic properties and Chaos has been a very active area of research.