Title text:
Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall–the forecast is always ‘cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.’
Transcript:
[A graph is shown. The X axis is labeled Number of Weather Balloon Launches Per Day. It’s logarithmic, with ticks in powers of 10, and values shown at 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion. The Y axis is labeled Weather Model Accuracy, no values are shown. The plot starts above the mark for 1 balloon, at about 40% of the maximum value of the curve, it quickly rises through a point labelled “Current Rate”, at about 4000 launches per day and 85% of the maximum. The maximum value is reached at 100 million, plateaus until 10 billion, and then reduces even more rapidly down to perhaps 15% maximum accuracy above the 10 trillion mark.]
Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/
I’m going to need someone to adjust the model for instances in which an F-22 starts shooting them down.
How about when an unhinged person in the White House starts defunding NWS and launches get cancelled (yes - happening already).
We launch over a thousand weather balloons per day?
It seems reasonable given that
spacethe atmosphere is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.
There really is an xkcd for everything.