If a Butterfree in Kanto flaps its wings, will there be a hurricane in Paldea?

NumberOneSpinelApologist

NumberOneSpinelApologist

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Not sure if this is the right section, it technically relates to pokemon worldbuilding, but I am not writing anything, so this does not really belong in the writers lab as well? This is just general speculation.
So, with that out of the way: The title question.
If a Butterfree in Kanto flaps its wings, will there be a hurricane in Paldea?
To put it less poetically, how does the weather work in the pokemon world? The pokemon can essentially control weather at will. That could have big implications on both the local and global conditions.
As @LegendsCelebi would definitely explain this better than me, but a lot of factors have impact on how the weather and climate behave, and the equations and models that try to predict them are INCREDIBLY complex. How do the researchers at the Weather institute cope with this? I want to see their supercomputers!
Or maybe, Arceus itself simply has to micromanage the weather, otherwise the world would simply not be able to have any consistent weather patterns because of all the pokemon impacting it whenever they feel like it?

What do you think?
 
Weather modelling is already wildly complicated without superpowered plushie turtles casually breaking conservation of mass. To answer the question "how does weather service cope" we'd need to answer a few questions, which themselves lead to more questions...
1) How localized is the weather effect summoned by a pokemon? When a Drizzle 'mon enters the battle does it create something akin to putting a shower above our heads, or does it bend the weather patterns across 10 km to make sure that "plain" physics precipitates water onto the battle?
2) How long does the weather change last?

MSG would have me think that the weather changes caused by pokemon are very, very weak affairs. What is 5 turns, 30 seconds...? wait not this turn-based RPG... well, a few minutes at most. Then once we leave the combat screen the overworld weather isn't changed (note to romhackers: take care of this oversight). So Rain Dance, Hail, Sunny Day, Sandstorm... are not really significant in the grand scheme of the weather system and weather prediction. Not much more than watering lawns or artificial snow on ski slopes or IR lamps deployed at restaurants in winter...

That is, when one Pokemon does it every now and then.

But poke-world is filled to the brim with superpowered plushies (and superpowered horrors beyond human comprehension). And hordes, outbreaks, "tribes" of pokemon are staples of storytelling in the anime and to a degree in the games. So we should probably assume that there are parts of pokemon world where occasionally weather goes absolutely bonkers because a big bunch of Larvitar (picks up Sandstorm at lv 5) got upset. Or when local Seedots get cold and bust some clouds with Sunny Day. Even if a single cast isn't significant if we start multiplying by 100s of Pokemon we may get to some cool (pun intended) effects.

Overuse of Sunny Day over a small area could cause the "urban heat island" effect (not very urban tho). Rain Dance repeated over and over again could cause flooding or impact water cycle locally (increasing air humidity). Hail-capable 'mons are mostly confined to cold parts of the world so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Now dipping our toes into zooecology and biogeography we should consider whether Pokemon populations remain largely stationary or if they migrate en masse all over the world. If they're stationary (and MSG tells us they largely are - we don't change encounter tables every day) our Weather Service is golden - just add these populations and their statistical impacts on the weather to the model like we would a city or a lake, gg, ez.

If Pokemon migrate then we may try to put these funky GPS-bracelets-for-birds on a few thousands (milions?) of them, track their movements over several years, correlate with weather anomalies, and drop this into the model. It won't be perfect (the models aren't anyway) but it should work.

Sidenote: a kind of population mapping is what Friede was doing as research before he decided that airship anarchism>>>academic accolades. So it's at least relevant enough to fund a proper citizen science programme.

This is all in the context of large-scale (region or larger) weather modelling and prediction. On the scale of our daily experience we are kinda screwed in the world where localised weather changes are basically random. Yes, the weather website is accurate when it says that the weekend will be sunny. But it won't predict the fact that a random protagonist just had to practice weather builds in the same park you have picked for picnic.
 
If you ask me, weather causing stuff like Sunny Day, Rain Dance, Snow Warning, etc don't cause that weather in literally the whole region. Instead, that weather only applies the battlefield specifically. Or maybe about a mile or two in coverage outside of battle or something.

The only exception to this rule would be Legendary Pokémon. I mean, Groudon and Kyogre LITERALLY cause region wide Sunny Days and Rain in the Hoenn games.
 
RichestAirPirate said:
I mean, Groudon and Kyogre LITERALLY cause region wide Sunny Days and Rain in the Hoenn games.
Click to expand...
the crazy part is that in emerald, they're doing this simultaneously, and visually the weather effect changes back and forth rapidly between harsh sunlight and a torrential downpour. makes you wonder what the hell is actually happening up in the sky with the clouds

@LegendsCelebi i'm definitely not equipped to contribute knowledge to this scientific discussion but reading your post speculating about all this was a treat, thank you
 
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