The Weather Notebook: Historic Weather Stations

Historic Weather Stations
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The Smithsonian Institution Building. Circa 1885
Nowadays, weather gets forecasted, monitored and recorded in rather drab institutional buildings, but this was not always the case. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.

Back in the second half of the 19th century, when meteorology was just taking hold as a serious science, some remarkable structures and spectacular settings were dedicated to tracking the weather. Probably the oldest and certainly the grandest was the great hall of the Smithsonian Castle in Washington. Starting in 1856, Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian's first director, used this Norman-style sandstone hall to showcase a large map that displayed the weather condition over the whole country, based on readings telegraphed to Washington by a national network of observers.

The Belvedere Castle in New York's Central Park.
New York and Boston also used castles for weather research. The toy-like Belvedere Castle in New York's Central Park, built in 1869, was once the home of the New York Meteorological Observatory and became a data station for the US Weather Bureau in 1919. Boston's weather castle, the Blue Hill Observatory, rose in 1885 on a granite ledge overlooking the city. Now open as a museum, the Blue Hill Observatory claims to have the longest continuously monitored weather records in the country.

Finally, for sheer grandeur of location, no weather station can match our very own Mount Washington Observatory at the summit of New England's highest peak. Regular meteorological observations were taken here from 1870 to 1892, and the Mount Washington Observatory reoccupied the summit in 1932. Since then, atmospheric researchers have maintained an unbroken record of some of the most intense - and most inspiring - weather on the earth's surface, aside from bringing you The Weather Notebook, which is funded by Subaru and the National Science Foundation. Thanks go to today's writer, author David Laskin.