Weather Symbols Ask Dave a weather question

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Think about what a pain in the neck it would be to go cross-country road trip without a map.

Or the same about building a house without blueprints. That's how meteorologists must have felt in the 1700s, before there was any such thing as a weather map. Hi I'm Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook.

Even without maps, in those days, folks like Benjamin Franklin and some of his colonial colleagues managed to figure out the crucial fact that weather systems generally move from west to east. They would find long after the storm that it had hit different cities on successive days, starting west and moving east. There was no way to pool observations quickly enough however, for a real-time weather map to be made, and the lessons about weather were learned well after the fact. This knowledge of weather system movement could not be applied unless real time maps could be made.

Current U.S. Weather Map

What made real-time -- or at least only minutes old --weather maps possible was the invention of the Teletypein 1837. Now, people could take readings and sendthem to a central point where the day's weather couldbe mapped out and knowledge of the atmosphere couldbe used to make forecasts for all over the country. Butthis raised another question: how do you condense allthat information about wind, pressure, temperature,humidity, and clouds for each location? The answer,developed in the early 1800s, was a set of symbols to beused on a synoptic weather map, synoptic meaning thewhole picture. The same basic set of symbols is still inuse today and it all makes sense to meteorologists these days, the way it did meteorologists 150 years ago. The Weather Notebook is written today by Bob Henson. Support is provided by Subaru and by the National Science Foundation.