How Does Climate Change Affect Forecasts?

Written By Teacher: Meighan Hooper

Meighan has been an arts educator and instructional designer since 2007. Originally from Ontario, Canada, she began teaching internationally in the Middle East and Asia in 2013. Meighan has designed programs of study based on a variety of curriculum including Canadian, American standards-based, Primary Years Program (IB), and British National curriculum.

Here’s a great bell ringer to kick off a lesson: Ask your students if they think climate change could make weather forecasting less accurate. It’s a fun way to spark curiosity about the link between shifting climates and weather prediction. Share with them that forecasting depends more on real-time atmospheric data than historical trends, which makes climate change an interesting challenge for meteorologists.

For middle school, try the "Extreme Weather Lesson: Are Winters Getting Worse" to dive into how climate change is impacting winter weather. For elementary, the "Weather Data and Graphing Activity" is perfect for introducing basic weather concepts while encouraging critical thinking. And for kindergarten, the "Weather Lesson: Music and Art" is a creative way to teach about extreme weather using sound and art. These activities provide practical and engaging ways to incorporate climate change education into weather lessons.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

To predict the future, one must understand the past. Part of forecasting the weather is knowing a place’s meteorological history, so we can check whether the atmospheric conditions we’re seeing today led to sun or rain in the past. Because of climate change, however, today’s weather patterns look different than those of even a few decades ago. Does this mean our weather forecasts will grow less reliable?

Luckily, no, says Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT. The reason is that modern weather forecasting uses totally different methods.

Up until about the 1950s, weather forecasting relied on a kind of modeling based on statistics from the historical record. That approach would be problematic in a world with a rapidly changing climate. But with today’s far more powerful computers, modern meteorologists can take real-time atmospheric measurements and plug them into a model of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, to simulate conditions days into the future.

“It is basically an algorithm for solving differential equations that govern the behavior of fluids, radiation, oceans, the atmosphere, cloud physics, and more,” Emanuel says. Even if the Earth’s climate changes, the physics that govern these forces do not. “The model is solving physical equations that should be valid no matter what the climate is.”