Wind, war and weathermen
Well into the 20th century, American weather forecasting was not a rigorous science, but an “art,” as a National Research Council report stated in 1918. Forecasters knew, among other things, that weather generally moved from the west; that high barometric pressure indicated cold temperatures; and that low pressure meant rain. They would collect data by telegraph, make charts and provide forecasts, which were often faulty. Weathermen were popular objects of ridicule.By the early 1940s, however, American universities were training thousands of military weather forecasters to see the atmosphere as a dynamic global system driven by powerful high-altitude winds. During World War II, this approach helped determine the timing of crucial Allied operations such as the D-Day invasion.In large part, this transformation of American meteorology stemmed from one gregarious, fun-loving Swedish scientist: Carl-Gustaf Rossby, who founded the country’s first meteorology program at MIT in 1928, gave the discipline mathematical rigor and...