Three Kinds of Butterfly Effects within Lorenz Models

Summary

This entry distinguishes three meanings of the butterfly effect. The first is the classical sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaotic systems. The second is Lorenz's metaphorical question about whether tiny disturbances might help trigger a remote tornado through multiscale interactions. The third concerns collective small-scale processes, ill-conditioning, and numerical instability in multiscale models. Separating these meanings helps avoid treating the butterfly effect as a single mechanism across all atmospheric prediction problems.