How hard is it to forecast the weather?

 The Bureau of Meteorology has a job to do. It is supposed to forecast the weather. 

Now I know it is an "inexact" science at the best of times but they have a lot of very expensive equipment, including a satellite or two, with which to do it. Surely they can give us a rough idea of what the day holds? 

As a kitten I can remember being taken to a weather station. The entire school, around fifty of us, were taken to the "big" town about a hundred kilometres away. This was done by crowding everyone into  the two school "buses" (a Kombi and a Ford transit type) and cars. It was the big excursion of the year. 

We were excited. We were going to see the weather station, the "School of the Air", the airport and the dock for the ships. I often wonder what the modern child would make of these things. We thought it would be interesting. 

It was.  We said "hello" to our mates at a couple of the "stations up the track". (No, not railway stations but big sheep farming properties.)  The teacher at the School of the Air had arranged that even though nobody was too sure what to say to each other. We saw a plane come in to land and were then allowed to have a closer look. We went down to the water and a couple of the boys found a dead fish. We had lunch on the foreshore and there was the big treat of ice cream for everyone. 

Then we went to the weather station. It would be quite different now but back then it was a fascinating place of "things" going around in circles and bars and graphs and a telescope we could look through. (There was no stars of course. It was daylight.) And then the man in charge of the station showed us "the balloon". It was black. It had to be inflated. He told us how it would help to predict the weather. Then he did actually inflate it and, at the correct moment, it went up. Now, he told us, they would be able to tell what sort of weather we were going to have.

Suitably impressed by this we left and made the long trek back to our little school.

The following day the Senior Cat did all the proper follow up lessons. He talked about the balloon, of course he did. We had all been rather impressed by the idea that a balloon might be able to tell us what the weather would be like. 

It all worked very well until one of the boys who was repeating the final year for the third time because he was not old enough to leave school said something like, "I told my Dad and he said to go and ask Grandpa because Grandpa always knows too." 

I remember the Senior Cat nodding and saying, "Yes. That is the next thing we need to talk about. How do farmers know what the weather might do?"

We went on to learn about "observation" and "experience".  Our BOM could do with some of that generation of farmers to teach them a thing or two. This year's "dry" year has produced more rain in a month than we get most years.