Yep, looks like sunshine.
Them weather boys have spent a lotta time a-countin and a-calculatin to let ya’ll know when to head for the beaches. Let’s give em their due: weather forecastin is better than it was and we got so much data that it’s a full time job a-pumpin it into them weather computers.
But on the whole, forecastin could be a whole lot better. Just ask em in New Orleans
So ya’ll can be forgiven for being a lil sceptical when these solar scientists say they gonna use the same techniques for forecastin solar flares.
Eric “Blue” Bélanger at the University of Montreal and a few pals reckon that a weatherman’s number crunchin technique called 4D-VAR can forecast new flares based on the past patterns of old ones.
Them Canadians must be a-wearin rose-tinted specs.
Now ah could be wrong, but ain’t there some important differences between weather systems on Earth and flares on the Sun? Not least of these is that the energy release from solar flares is scale free. So when ya’ll watch a solar flare evolve, no matter how slow it looks, you ain’t got no idea how big it’s gonna be.
That puts em in the same category as earthquakes, stockmarket crashes and forest fires. If them things were forecastable using 4D-VAR, meteorologists would all now be a-sitting back in their Bermudan beach huts, a-smokin cubans and a-suppin manhattans. Instead they’re a-sweatin and a-fussin over stratospheric cloud cover.
So it don’t take too much predictin to see where this kinda solar flare forecastin is gonna end up.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.1941: Predicting Solar Flares by Data Assimilation in Avalanche Models