The Butterfly Effect

The butterfly effect essentially sums up Lorenz's realization that long-term weather forecasting was doomed.  Through his simple model he witnessed the phenomenon known as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" or the butterfly effect. According to the idea of the butterfly effect, in meteorology the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.


Source URL: http://crossgroup.caltech.edu/chaos_new/Lorenz.html