Daily Archives: May 12, 2025

Immediately after WW II, it became fashionable to imagine technologies that might allow human beings to control the weather.  In fact, one goal advanced by influential scientists was actually to explode nuclear bombs in the right locations and in the right quantity so as to alter the weather in favorable ways.  Such an enterprise would require accurate forecasts of the weather thought possible by using the brand new computer technology to make the millions of requisite calculations. 

The drive to use computer models for weather forecasting was initiated at a secret meeting at the U.S. Weather Bureau headquarters in Washington D.C. on the rainy morning of January 6, 1946.  After a series of successes and setbacks that mostly discouraged the broad meteorological community, the first operational computer generated forecasts were issued on the afternoon of May 6, 1955. Continue reading →