I have always felt that weather services worldwide receive unfair criticisms. The reasons for these criticisms is that the common citizen has no idea of the complexity our atmosphere exhibits. We have come a long way from using our fingers to detect an approaching storm, to the use of satellite imagery to actually detect it.
Clouds do not just randomly move across the sky. A series of processes in the atmosphere, as well as on the ground, and sometimes even inside the earth (volcanoes), affect the creation, makeup, and movement of these weather systems. Prediction models are far from perfect, as they use past data to hypothesize about future weather conditions, which is like using a war in the past to predict the outcome of a similar war in the future. Though this is not a flawless comparison, I believe the point can still be taken from it.
We are just beginning to understand all aspects of our planets system. The main idea of our planet that we do know is that all processes are interlinked. When an ape in the jungle eats a plant, it then ejects the digested product back into the soil as fertilizer, creating new plants, which consume more carbon dioxide while giving off more oxygen, which alters the makeup of our atmosphere slightly, but surely. This is just a microscopic view of the entire planetary feedback system.
In reality, weather forecasts are right more often than not. Meteorologists are some of the top minds that our planet has to offer, as they work day and night to perfect current models of weather detection. Sadly, in order to flawlessly detect the weather conditions for the next day, we would have to have a total and complete understanding of how the planet works, a feat that we me come close to, but never obtain.
