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Maps to the Masses
Wed Apr 20, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
The weather map, like a topographical map, is a two dimensional interpretation of a three dimensional world. It's a tricky thing to come up with a weather map, but they've been around for over a century. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.
Around 1900, the basic weather map's format was pretty much set. There were H's for centers of high pressure, L's for low pressure, and lines of equal pressure, called isobars, drawn around the highs and lows. However, the maps lacked cold fronts and warm fronts. That's because scientists hadn't discovered them yet.
It was the so-called Bergen School of Meteorologists, in Bergen, Norway, that conceived the notion of fronts, of air masses clashing along boundaries. They named these boundaries after the battlefronts that were then raging in World War I. It has turned out to be a good comparison, because both in military and meteorological terms, the front is where the action is.
It took almost 20 years for the United States to accept this European concept, but by 1936, all official weather maps began to include fronts. However, the public knew little of fronts then, because there was no such thing as a weathercast on the six o'clock news. It took television to make cold fronts and warm fronts household phrases; because TV is such a visual medium, the earliest weathercasters relied on maps to tell their story.
Once TV became more common in the 1950s, the country started getting used to the evening forecast, and we became familiar with those wavy lines that snake their way across the country, showing changing weather on a changing weather map.
Thanks today to writer, Bob Henson. Funding is provided for The Weather Notebook by Subaru of America and by the National Science Foundation.
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