SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Tomorrow's Weather: Cloudy, With a Chance of Fractals

from New Scientist

... About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple.

Even at the time, with scientific meteorology still in its infancy, the idea seemed absurd: key equations governing the behaviour of the 5 million billion tonnes of air above us had already been identified--and they were anything but simple.

No one was more aware of this than Richardson, who is recognised as one of the founders of modern weather forecasting. ...Yet Richardson suspected that behind the mathematical complexity of the atmosphere lay a far simpler reality--if only we looked at it the right way.