"Winter is coming"

TL;DR

This paper explores the unpredictable nature of seasonal weather in Westeros by modeling a hypothetical circumbinary planet's dynamics, concluding that accurate long-term weather prediction is fundamentally impossible due to complex three-body interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of three-body dynamics to explain erratic seasonal changes on a fictional planet, highlighting the limits of predictability in such systems.

Findings

Long and severe winters (~850 days, T<268K) are as likely as short and mild ones (~600 days, T~273K).

Predicting the exact length or severity of winter in a circumbinary system is fundamentally infeasible.

The complex orbital dynamics prevent reliable long-term weather forecasting.

Abstract

Those that do not sow care little about such mundane things as equinoxes or planting seasons, or even crop rotation for that matter. Wherever and whenever the reavers reave, the mood is always foul and the nights are never warm or pleasant. For the rest of the good folks of Westeros, however, a decent grasp of the long-term weather forecast is a necessity. Many a maester have tried to play the Game of Weather Patterns and foretell when to plant those last turnip seeds, hoping for a few more years of balmy respite. Tried and failed. For other than the somewhat vague (if not outright meaningless) omens of "Winter is Coming", their meteorological efforts have been worse than useless. To right that appalling wrong, here we attempt to explain the apparently erratic seasonal changes in the world of G.R.R.M. A natural explanation for such phenomena is the unique behavior of a circumbinary planet. Thus, by speculating that the planet under scrutiny is orbiting a pair of stars, we utilize the power of numerical three-body dynamics to predict that, unfortunately, it is not possible to predict either the length, or the severity of any coming winter. We conclude that, alas, the Maesters were right -- one can only throw their hands in the air in frustration and, defeated by non-analytic solutions, mumble "Coming winter? May be long and nasty (~850 days, T<268K) or may be short and sweet (~600 days, T~273K). Who knows..."