Weather by the Numbers

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, meteorology was more art than
science, dependent on an individual forecaster's lifetime of local experience. In Weather
by the Numbers, Kristine Harper tells the story of the transformation of meteorology from
a "guessing science" into a sophisticated scientific discipline based on physics and
mathematics. What made this possible was the development of the electronic digital computer; earlier
attempts at numerical weather prediction had foundered on the human inability to solve nonlinear
equations quickly enough for timely forecasting. After World War II, the combination of an expanded
observation network developed for military purposes, newly trained meteorologists, savvy about math
and physics, and the nascent digital computer created a new way of approaching atmospheric theory
and weather forecasting. This transformation of a discipline, Harper writes, was the most important
intellectual achievement of twentieth-century meteorology, and paved the way for the growth of
computer-assisted modeling in all the sciences.