The History of Computers and Weathercasting |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for the Mount Washington Observatory and this is the Weather Notebook.
Back in 1922, English mathematician Lewis F. Richardson was convinced he could forecast the following day's weather all over the globe -- if only he had 64,000 people working 24 hours a day to help him do the math.
Richardson had come up with an ingenious theory of weather prediction using what he termed 'equations of atmospheric motion', which could be applied to a grid of wind and air pressure readings. But the problem, was solving the equations fast enough to 'race the weather.' Hence the 64,000 human math machines he referred to as computers.
Richardson did not imagine that scarcely a generation later an entirely different kind of computer would clear this arithmetic hurdle. The first successful numerical prediction of weather was made in April of 1950, not with thousands of human computers, instead with one that had no living parts.
Forecasting and computers have come of age together more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. Whereas the first generation of dedicated weather computers performed 1000 operations per second, today's supercomputers zip through billions of operations a second as they crank out two complete mathematical models of the atmosphere twice a day.
Weather has always been one of the forces driving advances in computer technology. It's a success story due, in large part, to Lewis Richardson, who never dreamed of computers being driven by anything but the human brain.
David Laskin was today's writer and a contributor to The Weather Notebook's companion book, Soul of the Sky.
Underwritten by Subaru, the Beauty of All Wheel Drive.
Funding provided by the National Science Foudation
An excerpt from A Forecast Factoryby Lewis F. Richardson
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