Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (review)

The history of various fields and aspects of nineteenth-century scientific advances seems to have become a growth industry.¹ Anderson extends this field into Victorian meteorology. But her book is not a recounting of the development of the advance of meteorology. Rather, it is a story of meteorology's uncertain status in the nineteenth century. We could imagine meteorology located in a solid of three dimensions—natural science, laypersons' judgment, and astrologers/almanac writers. It is not at all obvious that constant progress was made in the direction of the scientific plane. Natural scientists sought to establish fundamental properties of weather, but the public wanted weather forecasts and storm warnings. A key theme in Anderson's study is the tension between scientific truth and probabilistic, useful knowledge sought by the natural scientists and the public, as well as within the science community itself.

In some ways, Predicting the Weather is more ambitious than Fleming's excellent Meteorology in America: 1800–1870, which limited itself to the development of meteorology in the United States up to the establishment of a government weather service with the Army Signal Service.² Anderson takes on the more challenging goal of understanding how Victorian society perceived the weather science through her analysis of key scientists, administrators, publishers, and events. She succeeds to a reasonable degree. Highlights include the story of the establishment of a forecasting and storm-warning service in the United Kingdom and the suicide of its founder Robert Fitzroy in 1865, the scientific opportunities afforded by the British control of India (clear seasonal patterns and a large land mass with mountains and oceans as boundaries), and the role of weather prophets and almanacs.

Interestingly, Robert Fitzroy, director of the Board of Trade's Meteorological Department, was the captain of the Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage. Fitzroy came to oppose Darwin's theory from a religious perspective even as he was pushing to develop weather forecasts. Anderson discusses how scientists and theologians clashed over the call for divine intervention to alter the weather or protect a monarch's health.

Anderson writes more about the tension between the goals of theoretical scientists and the public; more information about what scientists actually concluded would have been useful. There was vigorous debate about the role of lunar phases and sunspots on weather (that the moon affects tides seems to have been known). The overall story would be more enthralling if the (later) scientific consensus of these issues and barometric readings had been made clear. One chapter, entitled "Precision and a Science of Probabilities," might well have been more specific about its subject. Since early forecasts and storm warnings of the Meteorological Department underwent heavy criticism, a quantitative measure of the accuracy of the forecasts and warnings might have been telling (the bias of an economic historian).

As Anderson notes, British forecasters were handicapped, relative to Americans, by the lack of a large Western land mass from which to gather data (storms generally travel west to east). British forecasters were humiliated in 1877 when New York Herald manager James Gordon Bennett, Jr., started cabling weather forecasts for England! With the exception of storm warnings, forecasts were discontinued after Fitzroy's death, until 1879. Predicting the Weather achieves a good balance between giving us the facts and the excessively theoretical approach sometimes found in modern scholarship.