Apparently, the storm of the century is on its way. How do I know? Not by looking out my window. It’s a grey, rainy day in February—a little warmer than yesterday, but otherwise pretty typical of the winter weather in my part of the eastern United States.
I know because I heard it on the local news blaring across my chiropractor’s waiting room yesterday. An excited meteorologist was pointing to a map illustrating two fronts converging on the East Coast. The report was confirmed by the New York Times this morning, which added the important piece of information that scientists don’t yet know whether the total snowfall on New England will be 17 or 27 inches, the latter a record breaker. Risk prevention is already in full swing. Flights have been cancelled, roads salted, and people with long commutes have called in sick to work. “Sniff, sniff” a lady in the chiropractor’s office pantomimed with a knowing smile.
For most of human history, being able to predict the weather with this much certainty was little more than a fantasy. Imagine setting off on a long journey by foot or in a ship with no knowledge about whether a snowstorm or a hurricane was just a day or two away. Into the 20th century, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people died each year of exposure, drowning, and other weather-related accidents because they didn’t know what was coming.
Not for lack of trying. European immigrants to the New World brought with them a robust tradition of trying to predict the weather via “weather signs.” In the age of satellite-based meteorology, these linger in our culture as quaint sayings such as “red sky at morning, sailor take warning.” It’s fun to tell small children that furry caterpillars predict a hard winter, though nobody’s going to book an expensive skiing vacation on the relative hirsuteness of the local invertebrates.
The most sophisticated pre-modern weather prediction goes all the way back to the Greeks. They figured out that they could predict the movement of moon, stars, and planets. From there, they made a powerful causal and as it turns out, wrong, leap. Heavenly bodies influence the weather. We can predict the movement of the heavens. Therefore we should be able to predict the weather. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is the last vestige of an astronomically-based weather prediction system that had a powerful hold on the imaginations of our ancestors. Harvard divinity students did the math to construct “tables of ephemerides” for weather almanacs and savvy entrepreneurs like Benjamin Franklin made lots of money from publishing predictions.
By Franklin’s time, sophisticated people (including Ben himself) were pretty sure that the stars didn’t cause the weather. They suspected the existence of what we would now call “weather systems” but could describe the patterns only after the fact.
So what made modern weather forecasting possible? In a word, telegraphy. Telegraphs, introduced in the 1840s, could move information faster than storms. Modern communications technologies combined with increasingly sophisticated ideas about weather systems, it gradually became possible to predict the weather with reasonable accuracy.
I know because I heard it on the local news blaring across my chiropractor’s waiting room yesterday. An excited meteorologist was pointing to a map illustrating two fronts converging on the East Coast. The report was confirmed by the New York Times this morning, which added the important piece of information that scientists don’t yet know whether the total snowfall on New England will be 17 or 27 inches, the latter a record breaker. Risk prevention is already in full swing. Flights have been cancelled, roads salted, and people with long commutes have called in sick to work. “Sniff, sniff” a lady in the chiropractor’s office pantomimed with a knowing smile.
For most of human history, being able to predict the weather with this much certainty was little more than a fantasy. Imagine setting off on a long journey by foot or in a ship with no knowledge about whether a snowstorm or a hurricane was just a day or two away. Into the 20th century, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people died each year of exposure, drowning, and other weather-related accidents because they didn’t know what was coming.
Not for lack of trying. European immigrants to the New World brought with them a robust tradition of trying to predict the weather via “weather signs.” In the age of satellite-based meteorology, these linger in our culture as quaint sayings such as “red sky at morning, sailor take warning.” It’s fun to tell small children that furry caterpillars predict a hard winter, though nobody’s going to book an expensive skiing vacation on the relative hirsuteness of the local invertebrates.
The most sophisticated pre-modern weather prediction goes all the way back to the Greeks. They figured out that they could predict the movement of moon, stars, and planets. From there, they made a powerful causal and as it turns out, wrong, leap. Heavenly bodies influence the weather. We can predict the movement of the heavens. Therefore we should be able to predict the weather. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is the last vestige of an astronomically-based weather prediction system that had a powerful hold on the imaginations of our ancestors. Harvard divinity students did the math to construct “tables of ephemerides” for weather almanacs and savvy entrepreneurs like Benjamin Franklin made lots of money from publishing predictions.
By Franklin’s time, sophisticated people (including Ben himself) were pretty sure that the stars didn’t cause the weather. They suspected the existence of what we would now call “weather systems” but could describe the patterns only after the fact.
So what made modern weather forecasting possible? In a word, telegraphy. Telegraphs, introduced in the 1840s, could move information faster than storms. Modern communications technologies combined with increasingly sophisticated ideas about weather systems, it gradually became possible to predict the weather with reasonable accuracy.
RSS Feed
