History
The history of numerical weather prediction began in the 1920s through the efforts of Lewis Fry Richardson, who used procedures originally developed by Vilhelm Bjerknes to produce by hand a six-hour forecast for the state of the atmosphere over two points in central Europe, taking at least six weeks to do so. It was not until the advent of the computer and computer simulations that computation time was reduced to less than the forecast period itself. The ENIAC was used to create the first weather forecasts via computer in 1950; in 1954, Carl-Gustav Rossby's group at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute used the same model to produce the first operational forecast (i.e. routine predictions for practical use). Operational numerical weather prediction in the United States began in 1955 under the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (JNWPU), a joint project by the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau. In 1956, Norman Phillips developed a mathematical model which could realistically depict monthly and seasonal patterns in the troposphere; this became the first successful climate model. Following Phillips' work, several groups began working to create general circulation models. The first general circulation climate model that combined both oceanic and atmospheric processes was developed in the late 1960s at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
As computers have become more powerful, the size of the initial data sets has increased and newer atmospheric models have been developed to take advantage of the added available computing power. These newer models include more physical processes in the simplifications of the equations of motion in numerical simulations of the atmosphere. In 1966, West Germany and the United States began producing operational forecasts based on primitive-equation models, followed by the United Kingdom in 1972 and Australia in 1977. The development of limited area (regional) models facilitated advances in forecasting the tracks of tropical cyclones as well as air quality in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 1980s models began to include the interactions of soil and vegetation with the atmosphere, which led to more realistic forecasts.
The output of forecast models based on atmospheric dynamics is unable to resolve some details of the weather near the Earth's surface. As such, a statistical relationship between the output of a numerical weather model and the ensuing conditions at the ground was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, known as model output statistics (MOS). Starting in the 1990s, model ensemble forecasts have been used to help define the forecast uncertainty and to extend the window in which numerical weather forecasting is viable farther into the future than otherwise possible.
Read more about this topic: Numerical Weather Prediction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)