With help from an orbiting meteorological spacecraft, scientists have found a atmospheric patterns that can be broken down into a series of cascading events, each of which in turn spawn smaller processes that follow "scale-by-scale simplicity."
If they are right, behind towering complexity lurks mathematical beauty.
Like some plants whose fronds contain ever smaller versions of the same overall leaf on a plane, atmospheric processes may unfold to reveal the the same process being repeated on smaller and smaller scales in three dimensions.
The result, according the article "Tomorrow's Weather, Cloudy with a Chance of Fractals," could be a dramatic improvement in very local forecasts and provide a valuable check on climate models.
Wayne
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