History of Meteorology

science that studies weather and climate using physics, chemistry, and other sciences. The term meteorology is derived from Aristotle’s Meteorologica (350 b.c.e.). The first official, regular weather reports were seen in China (1060 b.c.e.) with the first regular European weather observations in 500 b.c.e. The ancient Greeks were the first to divide the world into temperature zones, and Aristotle was the first to articulate the hydrologic cycle, describing the circulation and conservation of the Earth’s water using the evaporation and condensation cycle.

Scientific Measurement

It was not until Rene Descartes’s Les Meteores (1637 c.e.) that an attempt was made to establish the scientific basis of meteorology. Meteorology was nothing more than observational speculation prior to the scientific age, when devices for measuring and studying weather were invented, and the keeping of systematic weather records began.

Galileo Galilei invented the water thermometer for measuring absolute temperatures in 1593, and may have constructed the first thermoscope for measuring temperature changes in 1607. Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercury barometer that detected atmospheric pressure changes in 1643, making possible the observation that drops in pressure substantially correlate with the advent of storms in 1644. Blaise Pascal noted in 1648 that atmospheric pressure decreased with increasing altitude, deducing a vacuum above the Earth’s atmosphere, and in 1667 Robert Hooke invented the anemometer for measuring wind speed.

Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit created the mercury thermometer with his temperature scale in 1714, followed by Anders Celsius’s alternative temperature scale in 1735, which was adopted in Napoleon’s empire in the early 1800s. The daily observation of basic changes in air pressure, moisture, and the direction and speed of the wind was instituted by Laurent Lavoisie in 1765. Horace de Saussure’s hair hygrometer for determining humidity provided the last major instrumentation in 1780, and one of the final measuring standards necessary to move meteorology from observation into research and theorization. Luke Howard’s cloud classification system of 1802 and Francis Beaufort’s wind speed scale of 1806 provided additional observational tools. The scientific roots of climatology, a subdiscipline of meteorology until the late 20th century, were planted in the work of Edmund Halley’s 1686 mapping of the trade winds and his assertion of a relationship between solar heating and atmospheric change. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), sometimes credited as the first American meteorologist, observed that North American weather systems move west to east, discovered that lightning was electricity in 1752, charted the Gulf Stream, linked volcanic eruptions to weather changes, and associated deforestation with climate change. The German H. W. Brandes drew the first weather map in 1819.

Interpretation and Application of the Data Controversies based on the interpretation of the data began to increase as the number of government and academic-related weather observation and recording programs burgeoned in the United States in the first quarter of the 19th century. The most notable of these was the storm controversy (1834–59) involving William Redfield, James Espy, and Robert Hare concerning the nature, cause, and methodology for studying storms. Though never resolved, the controversy gave impetus to increasing observational networks and the theoretical understanding and application of meteorology by the U.S. military, the Franklin Institute, the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Philosophical Society. Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph and Morse code made the more rapid dissemination and analysis of this increasingly abundant information possible. The Army Signal Corps began using the telegraph in 1849, to disseminate daily weather observations through the U.S. Department of War, and in the same year, the Smithsonian began producing daily weather maps from telegraphic information.

In 1855, France created the first officially sanctioned national weather service in response to the loss of French vessels at sea during a storm in 1854. The first daily forecast was created by Robert Fitzroy, and first appeared in the London Times in 1860, and in 1861 the first system for port storm warnings was instituted. The modern weather map was introduced by the Paris Observatory in 1863, and was later enhanced by the use of innovative graphic devices, such as symbols and isobars, lines showing constant pressure. The U.S. Weather Bureau, created by the Army Signal Corps in 1870, was ceded to the Department of Agriculture in 1891, and Britain’s Meteorological Office was formed in 1872. 

William Ferrel’s 1856 postulation that midlatitude circulation cells created the prevailing westerly winds by serving as a deflecting force interacting with pressure gradients was confirmed in the late 19th century and named the Coriolis effect (force) in the early 20th century. Vilhelm Bjerknes’s work on mid-altitude cyclones led him to create, by 1920, a model of atmospheric change based on hydrodynamics and thermodynamics. The concepts of air masses and weather fronts were forwarded in the 1920s.

Though Bjerknes's work, along with Lewis Fry Richardson’s 1920s equation-based weather predictions, led to a rudimentary three-dimensional atmospheric model. The complexity of the equations and magnitude of the calculations caused this area of meteorology to languish until the availability of high-speed computers in the 1950s. Edward N. Lorenz applied chaos theory to the atmosphere in the 1960s, and his theories were integrated into the increasingly complex atmospheric modeling relegated to computers. The advent of the 21st century brought an increased emphasis on computer modeling through such joint projects as the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP), designed to model atmospheric phenomena on a global level.

Though Teisserence deBort began using kites and balloons to gather temperature data in 1899, it was not until the 1940s that radiosones (balloons) began daily measurements of temperature, humidity, and pressure of the upper-air. World War II fighter pilots discovered the jet stream, and later, surplus military radars began to measure precipitation. Doppler radar began replacing conventional radar in the 1990s. The first weather satellite, TIROS I (Television Infrared Observation Satellite), was launched in 1960.

Meteorology and Climate Change

A hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere was discovered in 1985, and the earlier detection of the warming of the Earth in 1980 gave impetus to the idea that one of the causes was human (anthropogenic) induced climate change from human-made ozone depleting gases. The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) responded by creating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and tasking it with studying the hypothesized phenomenon. The IPCC determined that the Earth had warmed over the last 150 years, and that that warming was due, in part, to human activity. In the executive summary of the report, the panel concluded that most of the observed global warming experienced in the last 50 years was because of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

The IPCC and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 12, 2007, for their work on global warming. The ever-increasing calculation power of computers made increasingly complex computer modeling of the atmosphere and many of the complex variables that impact weather and the climate possible. This made a greater understanding the causes and effects of such weather phenomenon as global warming and El Niño possible.

By 1997, a global treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established legally binding greenhouse gas emission restrictions on signatory countries by 2012, but did not include developing countries such as China and India. President George W. Bush of the United States did not sign the protocol. The enormous growth in the meteorology knowledge base in the 20th century led to its division into subdisciplines such as climatology, geophysical fluid dynamics, and atmospheric chemistry, as well as regional meteorologies.