Maybe the simplest answer to your question is that weather patterns are chaotic.
The concept of chaos is not difficult to understand. A system is chaotic if a very tiny change in its state can cause a major change to its state further down the road. There are a bunch of videos on Youtube of double pendulums - this is one of the simplest chaotic systems.
So, weather is difficult to predict. Weather forecasters can generally do a pretty good job of predicting the weather 3 days away, but more than that, and it gets a bit dicey. Having said that, there are macro patterns like El Nino/La Nina which can affect the weather for a long period of time.
SexCodex t1_j3o5rqx wrote
Reply to Are short term weather patterns generally related to each other or more random? by nbapip
Maybe the simplest answer to your question is that weather patterns are chaotic.
The concept of chaos is not difficult to understand. A system is chaotic if a very tiny change in its state can cause a major change to its state further down the road. There are a bunch of videos on Youtube of double pendulums - this is one of the simplest chaotic systems.
So, weather is difficult to predict. Weather forecasters can generally do a pretty good job of predicting the weather 3 days away, but more than that, and it gets a bit dicey. Having said that, there are macro patterns like El Nino/La Nina which can affect the weather for a long period of time.