> It's not as though this is part of a growing trend to abandon conventional weather and climate modeling.

The thing is, there *absolutely is* a trend towards private investment in weather modeling going towards faux-moonshot ideas like cubesat constellations without demonstrated ROI and that would require evolutionary leaps forward in data assimilation, or for deep learning to replace weather models. A miniature version of this already played out with precipitation nowcasting - probably the easiest weather forecasting problem that you could approach with an AI system, yet the approaches that have been developed so far barely improve over optical flow or other simple approaches, let alone advance our capability to forecast, say, convective initiation.

The future of weather forecasting is larger ensembles (O(100-500) ensemble members, across 2-5 different models) of near-convective-resolving global models at meso-gamma (2-10 km resolution) fed into slightly more sophisticated statistical post-processing systems - almost certainly trained using simple AI/ML techniques on large-scale reforecasts of these parent model systems, or brute-forcing purely Bayesian statistical approaches.

There are some profound problems with that idea once you get below 10 meter or so, but I'll let you think that one through yourself.

Thank you for telling me what a femtometer is, as though my using the word wasn't a pretty good indicator I knew what it was. You mean a femtometer is a real thing? And I just made that up out of thin air to mean a meter stick to give to women. What are the odds?

> There are about 2*140 atoms in the atmosphere. You can't even count to that number, let alone do any fluid dynamics to that.

Would you like me to explain how your argument is a straw man, or can I trust you to figure it out?

> I'm confident that we won't have femtometer scale simulations of the atmosphere before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows the earth.

Very colorful, but all you're really saying is that you are pessimistic about technology and about any staggeringly large advancements in computer design or weather sensor tech, while I, otoh, optimistically say I just don't know, but I bet computers will get faster, smaller and cheaper, and that within only a hundred years there will be weather tech that we are incapable of conceiving of today.

Sure, a femtometer is mind-bogglingly small, but it's only 15 orders of magnitude smaller than a meter. It's way bigger than a zeptometer. How is it even possible femtometers can be described so simply? But of course, there could never be any more advancements in mathematics, physics, computer engineering or our current understanding of weather and climate. We basically know all there is to know right now. Huh.

At the moment, no. But maybe there will be a way to accurately sense weather data at any location from LEO. IR thermometers are pretty neat, maybe something metaphorically along those lines, a satellite with a laser technology that could beam back accurate weather data from any location, and all atmospheric locations it can see along its orbit, sending the data to ground-based ultra-computer networks running simulations.

In 1933, no one would have believed that GPS was 40 years away. In 1985 most would not have been able to understand how flat and thin color monitors were only a decade away, nor that mRNA vaccines were less that 30 years away. Similarly, we really don't know what the future of weather sensing and prediction will be like in 2070, and if we could know, we wouldn't understand how it would be possible.

Incorrect. Any statement concerning the arguer and ignoring their argument is ad hominem and fallacious argument.

> And your second paragraph is amply demonstrating this.

Incorrect and a tu quoque argument. I did not address you, personally, but only your argument, and if my use of "you" is confusing, it is the royal you, "you all," and I may as well have used "we."

> I pointed out the physical implications of encoding your femtometer cubes at atomic scale.

Using current understanding of how it would have to be done and in denial that it might ever possibly be done more efficiently in the future.

> Nothing more.

>>> I think Maursault has thoroughly demonstrated their lack of serious thought

other than this ad hominem.

> You are proposing to simulate at subatomic scale so obviously encoding it into atoms will make the simulation larger than the object similated.

and this straw man

> To engage with your argument directly: You have none.

but wait while you prove yourself wrong,

> All you repeat is that the past has seen technological breakthroughs,

Yes, my argument is that technology advances, and since it has always done so, my crazy idea is that it will keep on doing so. Though it is possible technology has stopped advancing, I think it is unlikely.

> therefore the specific fantasy you propose makes sense. Non sequitur.

The specific fantasy is your straw man, and I drew no conclusions, those are yours. Frankly, my first comment was a joke and not meant to be taken literally, and I only intended to argue against someone else's idea that increasing simulation resolution is not the future of weather modeling, and you're not the only one that got tripped up by my use of femtometer. Regardless, I still see it as possible territory, and anyone else not being able to conceive of how does not mean it is impossible, only that we can't conceive it, just like Bill Gates, not a stupid man, was unable to conceive of anyone needing more than 64KB of RAM, so you also are unable to conceive of how something that would require incredible, inconceivable advances in technology to achieve, and yet, within the next 5 years modern medicine will advance further than it has in all the years before, that's just how it is, and students of the history of technology know this the same way you know how many femtometers there are in silicon's lattice spacing. What you seem to be unable to do is understand there are things we don't understand, and in physics, a good example of this is dark matter, which for some reason we haven't figured out a way to detect it, and it is so similar to the luminiferous ether in this regard, that only students of the history of science suspect that it might be bullshit, while every scientific mind is convinced it exists, just like the luminiferous ether in 1886.

> That some breakthroughs have happened doesn't mean that any random breakthrough will happen. And your ideas are pushing hard against the limits of physics.

As far as you or anyone else knows, today. But we don't know the future, and we never have. This is not my proof that this will occur, only that we don't know.