Started by Tomás Rinaldi (@tomas_rinaldi) ·
the first numerical weather forecast was done by hand and was spectacularly wrong
During WWI, while driving ambulances in France, Richardson worked out a six-hour forecast for a patch of central Europe by hand. It took weeks and predicted an absurd pressure change. But the method was basically right; the starting data needed smoothing. He also imagined a 'forecast factory' of 64,000 human computers in one giant hall.
6 sources · 1h 11m down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “first numerical weather forecast richardson”
- Ended at
- Butterfly effect
The Trail
- “first numerical weather forecast richardson” (google.com)
- Lewis Fry Richardson (en.wikipedia.org)
- Numerical weather prediction (en.wikipedia.org)
- ENIAC (en.wikipedia.org)
the first computer forecasts in 1950 took about as long to compute as the time they covered
- Edward Norton Lorenz (en.wikipedia.org)
- Butterfly effect (en.wikipedia.org)
the butterfly comes from the title of a talk Lorenz gave in 1972
What I came away with
Computers finally made his method work in 1950. Then in 1961 Lorenz restarted a simulation with numbers rounded from six decimals to three and got completely different weather a while later. That's the butterfly effect, and it's why modern forecasts run whole ensembles of slightly different starting points.
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