Weather Forecasting - History

History

For millennia people have tried to forecast the weather. In 650 BC, the Babylonians predicted the weather from cloud patterns as well as astrology. In about 340 BC, Aristotle described weather patterns in Meteorologica. Later, Theophrastus compiled a book on weather forecasting, called the Book of Signs. Chinese weather prediction lore extends at least as far back as 300 BC, which was also around the same time ancient Indian astronomers developed weather-prediction methods. In 904 AD, Ibn Wahshiyya's Nabatean Agriculture discussed the weather forecasting of atmospheric changes and signs from the planetary astral alterations; signs of rain based on observation of the lunar phases; and weather forecasts based on the movement of winds.

Ancient weather forecasting methods usually relied on observed patterns of events, also termed pattern recognition. For example, it might be observed that if the sunset was particularly red, the following day often brought fair weather. This experience accumulated over the generations to produce weather lore. However, not all of these predictions prove reliable, and many of them have since been found not to stand up to rigorous statistical testing.

It was not until the invention of the electric telegraph in 1835 that the modern age of weather forecasting began. Before this time, it was not widely practicable to transport information about the current state of the weather any faster than a steam train (and the train also was a very new technology at that time). By the late 1840s, the telegraph allowed reports of weather conditions from a wide area to be received almost instantaneously, allowing forecasts to be made from knowledge of weather conditions further upwind.

Ezekiel Stone Wiggins, known as the "Ottawa Prophet", wrote the "Architecture of the Heavens"; and Wiggins' storm herald, with almanac, 1883 which were based on his astronomical calculations and theories that storms, unusual tides, earthquakes and cyclones were all caused by planetary attraction, and that both visible and invisible planets could shift the Earth’s centre of Gravity. He lost credibility after a great Hurricane and Tidal Wave on March 9, 1883 was not as terrible as Dr. Wiggins had predicted. Mark Twain's humorous essays about Wiggins' prophecies appeared in American and Canadian newspapers.

The two men most credited with the birth of forecasting as a science were Francis Beaufort (remembered chiefly for the Beaufort scale) and his protégé Robert Fitzroy (developer of the Fitzroy barometer). Both were influential men in British naval and governmental circles, and though ridiculed in the press at the time, their work gained scientific credence, was accepted by the Royal Navy, and formed the basis for all of today's weather forecasting knowledge. To convey information accurately, it became necessary to have a standard vocabulary describing clouds; this was achieved by means of a series of classifications and, in the 1890s, by pictorial cloud atlases.

Great progress was made in the science of meteorology during the 20th century. The possibility of numerical weather prediction was proposed by Lewis Fry Richardson in 1922, though computers did not exist to complete the vast number of calculations required to produce a forecast before the event had occurred. The first computerised weather forecast was performed by a team led by the mathematician John von Neumann; von Neumann publishing the paper Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation in 1950. Practical use of numerical weather prediction began in 1955, spurred by the development of programmable electronic computers.

In the United States, the first public radio forecasts were made in 1925 by Edward B. "E.B." Rideout, on WEEI, the Edison Electric Illuminating station in Boston. Rideout came from the U.S. Weather Bureau, as did WBZ weather forecaster G. Harold Noyes in 1931. Television forecasts followed with James C Fidler in Cincinnati in 1940 or 1947 on the DuMont Television Network. The Weather Channel is a 24-hour cable network that began broadcasting in May 1982.