Sunday, December 13, 2015

Thanigai Panchangam - Rains

A friend sent me this and asked for my opinion: http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2921/1035/original.jpg - this is in Tamil - Thanigai Panchangam (an almanac).

I didn't understand the content.
In summary, it tries to indicate that during the period Dec-Jan, the oceans tend to boil and this could result in some catastrophic events in some place(s) in the world - the exact location cannot be ascertained a priori. 
If the prediction was specific to 2015, then it's an amazing prediction of the rains on Dec 1st 2015 in Chennai. This prediction seems to be general and not specific to 2015. 

Well the tsunami of 2004 that hit the Indian ocean was on Dec 24th. The major rains this year (2015) was on Dec 1. The tsunami that hit Dhanushkodi was in Dec 1964.

I looked up the list of tsunamis and the dates when they happened. Are they clustered around Dec-Jan? Not sure. Plenty are in Nov, July etc.

When I went through the top results from the google search for the following terms "very heavy rainfall" dates "more than" 250mm OR 25cm and when I looked at the dates when such heavy rainfall happened, most were around the middle of the year - not in Dec-Jan.

Did the almanac predict correctly?

I replied to my friend that after a major event, many theories are presented. It's always easier to say why something went wrong (or right) in hindsight than to predict accurately before the event. That it's the latter that I love, I have little interest in the former. 


Consistent accurate prediction is a rarity in varied fields - stock markets, weather, medicine, education to name a few. Of course in the novel "The Class", there is a mention that Harvard predicts the performance of its freshman students - I don't know whether it is true and if so, how accurate the prediction is!


Additional reading:


  1. http://Calmisc.blogspot.com/2015/11/chennai-weather.html
  2. http://www.indjst.org/index.php/indjst/article/viewFile/30416/26344

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