Question

What type of forecast is impacted the most by the butterfly effect ?

Answer 1

Can a butterfly flapping in Brazil cause a typhoon in Japan? "This much-used phrase opens the discussion to a variation of Chaos Theory, called the Butterfly Effect. During the 1950s, Edward Lorenz searched for a means of predicting the weather, as he found linear models to be ineffective. The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. It´s is a classic example of how everything in the world is connected together.  A single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions. he theorized that weather prediction models are inaccurate because knowing the precise starting conditions is impossible, and a tiny change can throw off the results.

Answer 2

The Butterfly Effect is one of the applied models in weather forecasting. It makes us understand that the reliability of forecasting drops considerably after 10 days.

Of course, the butterfly wings cannot cause a big storm, but in some cases, if the actual conditions can be studied it can have an effect, but is very hard to detect.

Professor Lovejoy, from McGill University, comments that "the Butterfly Effect treats the weather as random and uses historical data to force the forecast and reflect a realistic climate".