Investments supported by the Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have made the Gulf one of the most intensively sampled bodies of water in the world, providing the foundation for improved decision-making related to weather events and offshore energy production.

Predicting the weather is hard because a small unknown in the observed weather today, for example in wind speed or humidity, can have big impacts on our ability to predict future weather. Forecasters must work with the challenging fact that even very slight differences in today’s weather may evolve to become large differences in future weather patterns. This is the “butterfly effect”, a term that came into popular use after a meteorologist used the metaphor to capture the complexity of predicting the weather. Fortunately, the influence of these changes on important weather patterns starts small and grows over time, so forecasts today are usually quite accurate up to several days in advance.