In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology
  • Jennifer Ferng (bio)
Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology by Kristine C. Harper. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2008. 308 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-08378-2.

Farmers sometimes relied upon the intuition of wind direction, the natural instincts of animals, imminent storm clouds and heavy rainfall to predict how the weather would influence the prosperity of their forthcoming harvest. The U.S. Weather Bureau during the early 1920s, partially composed of several thousand unpaid volunteers who collected and transmitted local observations for regional forecasts that affected crop and road services, was, at the time, an ineffective government bureaucracy that envisaged how extreme heat temperatures would impact the transport of livestock and published empirical data on fruit frost for tobacco and alfalfa seed districts. Placing the Weather Bureau as one of the many strategic organizations at the heart of meteorology’s expansion into a theoretically sophisticated science, Kristine Harper traces from World War II into the 1960s the tribulations and successes of American and European scientists who introduced numerical computing techniques to the art of forecasting the weather as part of the Meteorology Project based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She shifts the spotlight away from the better-known contributions of mathematical prodigy John von Neumann and instead accentuates the daily decisions made by American meteorologists collaborating with external Norwegian experts who possessed more theoretical training and time-tested experience. Harper challenges some historians’ interpretations of von Neumann’s central role in developing numerical weather prediction, represented by such works as Frederik Nebeker’s Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (1995) and William Asprey’s John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (1990). Computational modeling during World War II—though widely prevalent in chemistry and physics—became defined in meteorology, in Harper’s view, through the pursuit of a mathematics-based theory of general circulation in the earth’s atmosphere. By pursuing the “control of nature,” American scientists attempted to master a new technology that would demonstrate a different style of scientific practice from that of their Norwegian counterparts.


Click for larger view
View full resolution

Harper’s claim stresses that von Neumann’s development of the “electronic brain,” which would eventually take only 90 minutes to make a 24-hour forecast, was influenced by a cadre of mathematicians and physicists who were responsible for the majority of the tedious advancements as part of an international effort that transformed the computer into a feasible instrument for weather prediction. This book is shaped as an institutional history, since Harper closely focuses on the interactions of the “military industrial academic complex” that developed between the Air Force, the Navy, the Weather Bureau and the Big Five schools that were among the first to instigate academic programs in meteorology, including Caltech, MIT, New York University, University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Chicago. This type of approach in studies of the sciences during World War II has also been predominant among scholars such as Paul Edwards, who defines the relationship between computer models, data and reality in his seminal work The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1997); Stuart Leslie, who writes about the research and development contracts acquired by MIT and Stanford in The Cold War and American Science (1994); and Jessica Wang, who analyzes scientists’ reactions to Cold War anti-communism in American Science in an Age of Anxiety (1998), to name a few.

In chapters 5 through 7, the reader is quickly immersed into the staffing shortages, funding discrepancies and ideological conflicts that surface between the strong personalities of von Neumann, Jule Charney, Philip Thompson and Carl-Gustav Rossby, who along with Arnt Eliassen were known as the “Scandinavian Tag Team.” In the face of dwindling financial funding for advanced research and a dearth of academically qualified practitioners, Rossby remained an essential mediator in disseminating concepts between various team members who closely mentored many of his students while founding the Meteorological Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, in later years. During the initial exercises for the...

pdf

Share