In the next ten years will weather forcasters be able to give monthly weather forcasts accurately?
IANAWF but I would doubt it since storms and other persistent weather patterns aren’t usually visibible (or detectable) 30 days in advance.
Could it be extended beyond the current 5 days? Probably, but subject to shifts and changes which would make them less accurate… so what’s the point?
Check this place out:
http://www.weatherplanner.com/wp/start.jsp
While there look over the Quick Info stuff in the left hand column.
Can’t vouch for their accuracy, is just a site I found a long time ago and saved for future use.
In ten years, I highly doubt it. I don’t have objective hard evidence, but right now it is sometimes possible to predict the weather about a week or so in advance. Along the lines of, a big storm could be affecting such and such area 7 days from now. Obviously nothing can be guaranteed, but something to watch out for. Hurricane Isabel this year was forecast very well, with the East Coast getting a heads-up at least 5 days in advance. People were prepared.
A lot of weather forecasting nowadays (I am not in this particular area, so I’m not totally up-to-date with how the technology stands…but I could most likely find out if you would like more information), seems to be focused on finer resolution mesoscale (anything with a spatial resolution of tens of kilometers) models. Meaning, better resolution models to help predict small-scale events more reliably…thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes. Another area is using ensembles, where you run the numerical model using initial conditions (temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc.) then tweak the initial conditions a little and run the model again (since we will never truly know what the initial conditions are). Repeat a good amount of times, and you can pick out trends that may not be apparent for any one model run. I think that this helps with confidence in the short-term, and identifying trends in the mid-range (5-10 days). Again, please don’t treat any of this as gospel. If you want gospel, please email me and I’ll see what I can dig up.
Past 10 days or so, what dolphinboy was saying, is that chaos theory plays a role, in that there are so many variables, it is often just a crapshoot. Obviously you can make educated guesses on trends over the 10-30 day period (warmer than normal, etc.) by identifying global patterns and whatnot, but identifying what will happen on any given day a month in advance, I don’t see happening for a long time, if ever.
However, re-reading your question, if you mean that monthly forecasts in general will be more accurate, I think that’s a safe assumption as we continue to observe and diagnosis various relationships between the earth, sea, and atmosphere, not to mention the increased computer power that will enable us to model things more accurately.