The better we understand those connections, scientists say, the better handle weвЂ™ll have on the weather in California. Just like the fabled butterfly flapping its wings, it causes changes that can lead to extreme heat waves, cold air outbreaks and flooding rains. (While the storminess pattern generally stops over the Central Pacific, the wind pattern races all the way across the Atlantic and back to the Indian Ocean.)Дespite its tropical origin, the MJO matters to Californians because as it gains momentum, it sets off a wave of weather phenomenon much beyond the tropics. The stormy region, which has more clouds and rainfall, is referred to as the enhanced part of the MJO, while the dry patches on its east and west with less rain are called the suppressed part. The system typically begins forming over the equatorial Indian Ocean and travels eastward, flanked on both sides by dry regions. The MJO is a large tropical system of clouds, rainfall and wind patterns-imagine a traveling storminess-that takes 30 to 60 days on average to work its way across the globe. One of the most intriguing, and least understood, is a weather phenomenon called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO. Which is a way of saying: a lot of people ask what it takes to make it rain in California, and the answer relies on a bewildering variety of inputs, some of them very complex and very far away. It also showed one of the reasons weather is so hard to forecast beyond a few days.

The experiment and the вЂњbutterfly effectвЂќ as it came to be since immortalized in popular culture, helped lead to a new understanding of nature in which it went from being mechanical and knowable to unpredictable and chaotic. This prompted him to ask вЂњwhether, for example, two particular weather situations differing by as little as the immediate influence of a single butterfly will generally after sufficient time evolve into two situations differing by as much as the presence of a tornado.вЂќ

When he came back several hours later, to his surprise, the results were totally different. One day, Lorenz decided to round up one of the input variables, from 0.516127 to 0.516, and then walked away from his computer.

In a famous experiment in the early 1960s, the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running computer simulations of weather patterns, trying to see how they changed when he changed variables like wind or temperature at the start.

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