Timeline of Meteorology - 20th Century

20th Century

• 1902 - Richard Assmann and Léon Teisserenc de Bort, two European scientists, independently discovered the stratosphere.

- The Marconi Company issues the first routine weather forecast by means of radio to ships on sea. Weather reports from ships started 1905.

• 1903 - Max Margules publishes „Über die Energie der Stürme“, an essay on the atmosphere as a three dimensional thermodynamical machine.
• 1904 - Vilhelm Bjerknes presents the vision that forecasting the weather is feasible based on mathematical methods.
• 1905 - Australian Bureau of Meteorology established by a Meteorology Act to unify existing state meteorological services.
• 1919 - Norwegian Cyclone Model introduced for the first time in meteorological literature. Marks a revolution in the way the atmosphere is conceived and immediately starts leading to improved forecasts.

- Sakuhei Fujiwhara is the first to note that hurricanes move with the larger scale flow, and later publishes a paper on the Fujiwhara effect in 1921.

• 1920 - Milutin Milanković proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity.
• 1922 - Lewis Fry Richardson organises the first numerical weather prediction experiment.
• 1923 - The oscillation effects of ENSO were first erroneously described by Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker from whom the Walker circulation takes its name; now an important aspect of the Pacific ENSO phenomenon.
• 1924 - Gilbert Walker first coined the term "Southern Oscillation".
• 1930, January 30 - Pavel Molchanov invents and launches the first radiosonde. Named "271120", it was released 13:44 Moscow Time in Pavlovsk, USSR from the Main Geophysical Observatory, reached a height of 7.8 kilometers measuring temperature there (-40.7 °C) and sent the first aerological message to the Leningrad Weather Bureau and Moscow Central Forecast Institute.
• 1935 - IMO decides on the 30 years normal period (1900–1930) to describe the climate.
• 1937 - The U.S. Army Air Forces Weather Service was established (redesignated in 1946 as AWS-Air Weather Service).
• 1938 - Guy Stewart Callendar first to propose global warming from carbon dioxide emissions.
• 1939 - Rossby waves were first identified in the atmosphere by Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby who explained their motion. Rossby waves are a subset of inertial waves.
• 1941 - Pulsed radar network is implemented in England during World War II. Generally during the war, operators started noticing echoes from weather elements such as rain and snow.
• 1943 – 10 years after flying into the Washington Hoover Airport on mainly instruments during the August 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac hurricane, J. B. Duckworth flies his airplane into a Gulf hurricane off the coast of Texas, proving to the military and meteorological community the utility of weather reconnaissance.
• 1944 - The Great Atlantic Hurricane is caught on radar near the Mid-Atlantic coast, the first such picture noted from the United States.
• 1947 - The Soviet Union launched its first Long Range Ballistic Rocket 18 October, based on the German rocket A4 (V-2). The photographs demonstrated the immense potential of observing weather from space.
• 1948 - First correct tornado prediction by Robert C. Miller and E. J. Fawbush for tornado in Oklahoma.

- Erik Palmén publishes his findings that hurricanes require surface water temperatures of at least 26°C (80°F) in order to form.

• 1950 - First successful numerical weather prediction experiment. Princeton University, group of Jule Gregory Charney on ENIAC.

- Hurricanes begin to be named alphabetically with the radio alphabet.

- WMO World Meteorological Organization replaces IMO under the auspice of the United Nations.

• 1953 - National Hurricane Center (NOAA) creates a system for naming hurricanes using alphabetical lists of women's names.
• 1954 - First routine real-time numerical weather forecasting. The Royal Swedish Air Force Weather Service.

- A United States Navy rocket captures a picture of an inland tropical depression near the Texas/Mexico border, which leads to a surprise flood event in New Mexico. This convinces the government to set up a weather satellite program.

• 1955 - Norman Phillips at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, runs first Atmospheric General Circulation Model.

- NSSP National Severe Storms Project and NHRP National Hurricane Research Projects established. The Miami office of the United States Weather Bureau is designated the main hurricane warning center for the Atlantic Basin.

• 1957-1958 - International Geophysical Year coordinated research efforts in eleven sciences, focused on polar areas during the solar maximum.

• 1959 - The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, was launched on 17 February. It was designed to measure cloud cover, but a poor axis of rotation kept it from collecting a notable amount of useful data.
• 1960 - The first weather satellite to be considered a success was TIROS-1, launched by NASA on 1 April. TIROS operated for 78 days and proved to be much more successful than Vanguard 2. TIROS paved the way for the Nimbus program, whose technology and findings are the heritage of most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA and NOAA have launched since then.
• 1961 - Edward Lorenz accidentally discovers Chaos theory when working on numerical weather prediction.
• 1962 - Keith Browning and Frank Ludlam publish first detailed study of a supercell storm (over Wokingham, UK). Project STORMFURY begins its 10-year project of seeding hurricanes with silver iodide, attempting to weaken the cyclones.
• 1968 - A hurricane database for Atlantic hurricanes is created for NASA by Charlie Newmann and John Hope, named HURDAT.
• 1969 - Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale created, used to describe hurricane strength on a category range of 1 to 5. Popularized during Hurricane Gloria of 1985 by media.

- Jacob Bjerknes described ENSO by suggesting that an anomalously warm spot in the eastern Pacific can weaken the east-west temperature difference, causing weakening in the Walker circulation and trade wind flows, which push warm water to the west.

• 1970s Weather radars are becoming more standardized and organized into networks. The number of scanned angles was increased to get a three-dimensional view of the precipitation, which allowed studies of thunderstorms. Experiments with the Doppler effect begin.
• 1970 - NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established. Weather Bureau is renamed the National Weather Service.
• 1971 - Ted Fujita introduces the Fujita scale for rating tornadoes.
• 1974 - AMeDAS network, developed by Japan Meteorological Agency used for gathering regional weather data and verifying forecast performance, begun operation on November 1, the system consists of about 1,300 stations with automatic observation equipment. These stations, of which more than 1,100 are unmanned, are located at an average interval of 17 km throughout Japan.
• 1975 - The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES, was launched into orbit. Their role and design is to aid in hurricane tracking. Also this year, Vern Dvorak develops a scheme to estimate tropical cyclone intensity from satellite imagery.

- The first use of a General Circulation Model to study the effects of carbon dioxide doubling. Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald at Princeton University.

• 1980s onwards, networks of weather radars are further expanded in the developed world. Doppler weather radar is becoming gradually more common, adds velocity information.
• 1982 - The first Synoptic Flow experiment is flown around Hurricane Debby to help define the large scale atmospheric winds that steer the storm.
• 1988 - WSR-88D type weather radar implemented in the United States. Weather surveillance radar that uses several modes to detect severe weather conditions.
• 1992 - Computers first used in the United States to draw surface analyses.
• 1997 - The Pacific Decadal Oscillation was named by Steven R. Hare, who noticed it while studying salmon production patterns. Simultaneously the PDO climate pattern was also found by Yuan Zhang.
• 1998 - Improving technology and software finally allows for the digital underlying of satellite imagery, radar imagery, model data, and surface observations improving the quality of United States Surface Analyses.

- CAMEX3, a NASA experiment run in conjunction with NOAA's Hurricane Field Program collects detailed data sets on Hurricanes Bonnie, Danielle, and Georges.

• 1999 - Hurricane Floyd induces fright factor in some coastal States and causes a massive evacuation from coastal zones from northern Florida to the Carolinas. It comes ashore in North Carolina and results in nearly 80 dead and $4.5 billion in damages mostly due to extensive flooding.