How are Lorenz attractors used to help predict the weather?
I don’t think Lorenz attractors are used to predict the weather. I think Lorenz gave us insight into the inherent unpredictability of weather and the importance of the initial conditions, which are always inexact to a certain level of precision. From that knowledge, people are now running ensemble predictions–essentially running the same weather models many different times with slightly different starting conditions. From that we can get some idea about how accurate the forecasts might be. If all the ensemble members look alike then maybe the forecast is pretty good, if the vary a lot the forecast is almost certainly no good. Here is a link to a web page with ensemble weather forecasts, this has its origins in the work of Lorenz. http://wwwt.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gmb/ens/ EDIT: I should probably add a little explanation on the linked page. As I mentioned, the ensemble forecasts are a group of forecasts for over the time p
