Take for example: air from the poles bring cold air, air from the equator bring in warm air; low pressure brings in cloudy conditions, high pressure brings in fair weather; High pressure from the polar region is cooler air, high pressure from the tropical region is warm air. On top of all the rules there is wind, elevation, moving clouds, rising and sinking air, the moisture level of the earth. Also there comes radiation of all sorts into play and much more.

Interesting? Yes extremely! Perhaps I will be able someday from now to small predict how the weather will be for the rest of that day or perhaps the day after, simply by analyzing the weather surrounding me on that moment. That would be cool. I live currently at sea and nothing changes so quickly as the weather at sea. I have also lived in the mountains and I said pretty much the same. That has also a good reason, some clouds get over the mountain, other's dont. The weather in the mountains can also change very rapidly. Temperature differences can also be rather big in the mountains.

But why did I start researching this? At first at least not to predict the weather, that interest actually came afterwards. No, I have been dreaming about making some sort of simplified simulation system for weather. Not to predict it, as many simulations have been made for, but to actually create it. Now I saw some simple version for kids to play around with some variables to create nice weather or blizzards.

Today while working it made me think though. We are trying to land on Mars, we have landed (or so they say) on the Moon. And we are experimenting with creating ecosystems. Yes.. ecosystems.. but that means as much as having water and plants and a livable environment for humans and animals. It means so much as creating green houses. They are actually working on these plans, Martian Greenhouses on Mars. Plants we have tried growing in the space station. It does.. but it requires a lot of extra attention, so they feel that genetic manipulation is required for plants to survive in space and on Mars. There are ofcourse also already speculations of recreating earth on Mars (terraforming) but I am not sure whether that would include weather aswell.

I really wonder now whether anyone has tried creating weather on small scale. Well perhaps that is the thing the chinese have tried to do by manipulating the weather. They tried to prevent rain for the Olympics and they try the same in the Himalaya to prevent bad harvest because of rain. Sofar cloud seeding and making clouds disappear have been the techniques used in this. Also some conspiracy activists tell me that the HAARP project in Northern Norway is a weather manipulator.
Manipulating weather is however not creating weather. Making an eco system inside a glass container is neither. I am really talking about creating a rain shower, a thunderstorm and a colder or warmer environment. Is this even possible? I have no clue. I'd say we can control a lot of things nowadays. We can put water into a system. I remember my parents having a big glass pot with a plastic lid on it. There was a certain amount of water in the pot and there were plants growing in it. From time to time you saw water under the plastic, forming big drops. Basicly a sweating plant showing condense on the plastic, which returns water again to the plants.

But.. can we? We can manipulate temperature (by sunlight) and let it rain (by condense), we can add warm or cold wind (by a ventilation unit in combination with heat/heating), we can create pressures by a closed circuit system, possibly we could even change pressures by air or temperature changes. But would we be able to create rainstorms, thunderstorms, snow?

In case of terraforming a planet such as Mars, you would perhaps get weather automatically as it has it's moons and gravity changes, temperature changes because of it trails around other planets and the sun and day and night cycles.

Think of the movie Jurassic Park. There they created a whole eco system for these dyno's. Not that that is very realistic, but anyway. I cannot remember however if they created weather in their eco system.

Really interesting stuff... and yes.. ofcourse if we could... than it could also be used against us in a war, but isn't that with everything ever developed?

Other sources:
Weather Prediction Education
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/

Spaceref: Earth on Mars: Greenhouses on the Red Planet
By Keith Cowing, Posted Sunday, June 2, 2002
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=455

Space, the next generation
http://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v07n2/space.html