Most of us get our weather news from the local television news as someone points to various maps with high and low pressure areas, pictures of clouds, sun, rain or snow. Predicting the next day’s weather is close to the outer limits and four days out is subject to change because, as one noted meteorologist once told me, “Weather is a definition of chaos.”
The weather changes rapidly; the temperature can go from a hot day to a cool night. Change is constant and only predictable over very brief time frames. There are, of course, the seasons in which one can anticipate broad changes as the Earth circumnavigates the Sun. Climatologists study trends that involve centuries such as the mini-ice age that gripped the northern hemisphere from around 1300 to 1850.
