On Sat, 09 Jan 2016 19:52:46 -0500, Peter Loring Borst  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>> In the results section the authors talk about the model predictions.  
>> What are the thoughts about the quality of the developed model?
>
> * The answer to this is: models may be state of the art but they are  
> notoriously unreliable. Garbage in=garbage out. They are barely adequate  
> to predict the weather 3 days in advance.

I did want to follow up on this because that's not entirely accurate and  
depends on which models are we talking about. Computer modeling of real  
events is as old as computer science itself (the first computers were used  
to calculate bullet trajectories for artillery - a model if there ever was  
one!), but some things can be modeled quite perfectly. (Full disclosure: I  
work for a company that sells such simulators). Specifically, modeling  
physical world, especially mechanical behavior is able to achieve 1-1  
match with real world experiments (car & airframe crash tests, for  
example). A lot of car commercials showing disintegrating car parts  
originate from those simulation models - no one crashes a new car for a TV  
commercial, much less an airplane. It was in 1995 that Dassault Systemes  
and Boeing teamed up to develop the first digital airplane mockup and the  
first 777 off the assembly line flew successfully without ever building a  
physical mockup for flight tests. The rest, as the say, was aviation  
history.

Weather models, as much as we might complain about them have also  
progressed by leaps and bounds and generally are dependent primarily on  
the computational power available and the size of the sample data. After  
all, we have hundreds years of data in certain cases to use as base for  
those models. That's why the current European weather prediction model is  
superior to the US because European Union has given itself a huge facility  
where the weathermen can compute more cycles in their models. US is  
playing catchup and weather computers are less powerful, but with our  
disfunctional Congress I wasn't able to find out if the money was  
allocated in this year's budget as promised.

On the other hand, I agree, modeling life events for which we do not have  
bullet-proof theories is hard and such models need to be approached with a  
very skeptical eye.

Przemek

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