Weather ‘forecaster’ Mr Ring’s methods are cloudy

During the past year, your newspaper has written often of a ‘weather guru’ or ‘weather expert’, a Mr Ken Ring, from New Zealand. Mr Ring publishes a weather almanac forecast for the year, predicting the weather for each month, week, and day.

Mr Ring says he uses the phases of the moon, but details of this method are not supplied. Scientific writers dismiss his method as nonsense and pseudo-scientific. Most people will appreciate that the motions of the moon are predictable, as far ahead as you like, and that the weather is chaotic, and cannot be predicted so simply — if it could be, you could, say, confidently forecast Christmas Day 2030.

In science, great strides are being made in extending the range of weather forecasts. The processes that drive the weather are well-understood, but the computations can only be carried out by very powerful computers. Conventional weather services routinely produce good forecasts up to a week ahead — quite accurate for the first five days, but, obviously, with decreasing accuracy afterwards.