Boys and beaks gathered on a cold evening for Dr Simon Clarke’s talk entitled “How certain can we be about uncertainty?” Dr Clarke has a PhD in climate physics and also runs a YouTube channel. His engaging talk primarily focused on explaining some of the maths behind weather forecasts.
Dr Clarke’s talk shed light on terms such as “phase shift” – a way of representing the changes in a system over time which meteorologists use to map out chaotic systems. These are systems whose outcomes can be predicted but can change drastically if the starting position is ever so slightly different. As such, this is why different weather stations can give different forecasts.
He went on to further explain how these systems would act with the utmost precision and factuality, Dr Clarke depicted how there is a point at which you would need more data to predict what would happen next accurately, which then results in only ever getting the weather forecast for up to ten days.
With Dr Clark comprehensively and eloquently explaining some seemingly complicated terms, his talk proved to be insightful and engaging.
