Timeline of meteorology

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Contents 1 Early events 2 18th Century 3 19th century 4 20th century 5 21st century 6 See also 7 References

The timeline of meteorology contains events of scientific and technological advancements in the area of atmospheric sciences. The most notable advancements in observational meteorology, weather forecasting, climatology, atmospheric chemistry, and atmospheric physics are listed chronologically. Some historical weather events are included that mark time periods where advancements where made, or even that sparked policy change.

[edit] Early events

• 350 BC - Aristotle wrote Meteorology.

Although the term meteorology is used today to describe a subdiscipline of the atmospheric sciences, Aristotle's work is more general. The work touches upon much of what is known as the earth sciences. In his own words:

...all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts.^[1]

One of the most impressive achievements in Meteorology is his description of what is now known as the hydrologic cycle:

Now the sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth.^[2]

• 25 - Pomponius Mela, a geographer for the Roman empire, formalized the climatic zone system.^[3]
• 1441 - King Sejongs son, Prince Munjong, invented the first standardized rain gauge. These were sent throughout the kingdom as an official tool to assess land taxes based upon a farmer's potential harvest.

• 1450 - Leone Battista Alberti developed a swinging-plate anemometer, and is known as the first anemometer.^[4]

- Nicolas Cryfts, (Nicolas of Cusa), described the first hair hygrometer to measure humidity. The design was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, referencing Cryfts design in da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus.^[5]

• 1494 Christopher Columbus experience a tropical cyclone, leads to the first written European account of a hurricane.
• 1606 - Galileo Galilei invents the thermometer.
• 1607 - Galileo Galilei constructs a thermoscope. Not only did this device measure temperature, but it represented a paradigm shift. Up to this point, heat and cold were believed to be qualities of Aristotle's elements (fire, water, air, and earth). Note: There is some controversy about who actually built this first thermoscope. There is some evidence for this device being independently built at several different times. This is the era of the first recorded meteorological observations. As there was no standard measurement, they were of little use until the work of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius in the 18th century.
• 1620 - Francis Bacon (philosopher) analyzes the scientific method in his Great Instauration of Learning.
• 1643 - Evangelista Torricelli invents the mercury barometer.^[6]
• 1648 - Blaise Pascal discovers that atmospheric pressure decreases with height, and deduces that there is a vacuum above the atmosphere.
• 1654 - Ferdinando II de Medici initiates the first weather observing network in Tuscany, Italy.
• 1662 - Sir Christopher Wren invented the mechanical, self-emptying, tipping bucket rain gauge.
• 1667 - Robert Hooke builds another type of anemometer, called a pressure-plate anemometer.^[7]
• 1686 - Edmund Halley presents a systematic study of the trade winds and monsoons and identifies solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions.
• 1686 - Edmund Halley establishes the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level.

[edit] 18th Century

• 1714 - Gabriel Fahrenheit creates reliable scale for measuring temperature with a mercury-type thermometer.
• 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests that aurorae are caused by "magnetic effluvia" moving along the Earth's magnetic field lines.
• 1735 - The first essentially correct explanation of global circulation was the study by George Hadley of the Trade winds.
• 1738 - Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamics, initiating the kinetic theory.
• 1742 - Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which led to the current Celsius scale.
• 1743 - Benjamin Franklin is prevented from seeing a lunar eclipse by a hurricane, he decides that cyclones move in a contrary manner to the winds at their periphery. ^[8]
• 1772 - Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory.
• 1783 - Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his book Reflexions sur le phlogistique, he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory.
• 1783 - First hair hygrometer demonstrated. The inventor was Horace-Bénédict de Saussure.

[edit] 19th century

• 1800 - The Voltaic pile was the first modern electric battery, invented by Alessandro Volta, which led to later inventions like the telegraph.
• 1802-1803 - Luke Howard writes On the Modification of Clouds in which he assigns cloud types Latin names.
• 1806 - Francis Beaufort introduces his system for classifying wind speeds.
• 1820 - John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule.
• 1822 - Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur.
• 1832 - An electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling.
• 1835 - Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis publishes theoretical discussions of machines with revolving parts and their efficiency, for example the efficiency of waterweels. At the end of the 19th century, meteorologists recognized that the way the Earth's rotation is taken into account in meteorology is analogous to what Coriolis discussed: an example of Coriolis Effect.
• 1836 - An American scientist, Dr. David Alter, invented the first known American electric telegraph in Elderton, Pennsylvania, one year before the much more popular Morse telegraph was invented.

• 1837 - Samuel Morse independently developed an electrical telegraph, an alternative design that was capable of transmitting over long distances using poor quality wire. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with Morse. The first electric telegram using this device was sent by Morse on May 24, 1844 from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore and sent the message:

What hath God wrought

• 1839 - The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway. Cooke and Wheatstone patented it in May 1837 as an alarm system.
• 1841 - Elias Loomis the first person known to attempt to devise a theory on frontal zones, and prepared some of the first known weather maps. The idea of fronts did not catch on until expanded upon by the Norwegians in the years following World War I.
• 1843 - John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored.

- James Prescott Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat.

- Lucien Vidie invented the aneroid, from Greek meaning without liquid, barometer.

• 1846 - Cup anemometer invented by Dr. John Thomas Romney Robinson.
• 1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics.
• 1849 - Smithsonian Institution begins to establish an observation network across the United States, with 150 observers via telegraph, under the leadership of Joseph Henry. ^[9]

- William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices.

• 1850 - Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative.
• 1854 - The French astronomer Leverrier showed that a storm in the Black Sea could be followed across Europe and would have been predictable if the telegraph had been used. A service of storm forecasts was established a year later by the Paris Observatory.
• 1860 - Robert FitzRoy uses the new telegraph system to gather daily observations from across England and produces the first synoptic charts. He also coined the term "weather forecast" and his were the first ever daily weather forecasts to be published in this year.

- After establishment in 1849, 500 U.S. telegraph stations are now making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian Institution. The observations are later interrupted by the American Civil War.

• 1865 - Manila Observatory founded in the Philippines. ^[10]
• 1869 - Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature.
• 1870 - Benito Vines becomes the head of the Meteorological Observatory at Belen in Havana, Cuba. He develops the first observing network in Cuba and creates some of the first hurricane-related forecasts. ^[11]
• 1873 - International Meteorological Organization formed in Vienna.

- United States Army Signal Corp, forerunner of the National Weather Service, issues its first hurricane warning. ^[12]

• 1881 - Finnish Meteorological Central Office was formed from part of Magnetic Observatory of Helsinki University.
• 1889 - India Meteorological Department established following tropical cyclone and monsoon related famines in the previous decades.
• 1890 - US Weather Bureau is created as a civilian operation under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• 1892 - William Henry Dines invented another kind of anemometer, called the pressure-tube (Dines) anemometer. His device measured the difference in pressure arising from wind blowing in a tube versus that blowing across the tube.^[13]
• 1898 - US Weather Bureau established a hurricane warning network at Kingston, Jamaica. ^[14]

[edit] 20th century

• 1902 - Richard Assmann and Léon Teisserenc de Bort, two European scientists, independently discovered the stratosphere.^[15]
• 1904 - Vilhelm Bjerknes presents the vision that forecasting the weather is feasible based on mathematical methods.
• 1905 - Australian Bureau of Meteorology established by a Meteorology Act to unify existing state meteorological services.
• 1919 - Norwegian Cyclone Model introduced for the first time in meteorological literature. Marks a revolution in the way the atmosphere is conceived and immediately starts leading to improved forecasts. ^[16] Sakuhei Fujiwhara is the first to note that hurricanes move with the larger scale flow, and later publishes a paper on the Fujiwara Effect in 1921. ^[17]
• 1920 - Milutin Milanković proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity.
• 1922 - Lewis Fry Richardson organises the first numerical weather prediction experiment.
• 1923 - The ENSO effects were first described by Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker from whom the Walker circulation, an important aspect of the Pacific ENSO phenomenon, takes its name.
• 1930 January 30 - Pavel Molchanov invents and launches the first radiosonde. Named "271120", it was released 13:44 Moscow Time in Pavlovsk, USSR from the Main Geophysical Observatory, reached a height of 7.8 kilometers measuring temperature there (-40.7 °C) and sent the first aerological message to the Leningrad Weather Bureau and Moscow Central Forecast Institute.^[18]
• 1935 - IMO decides on the 30 years normal period (1900-1930) to describe the climate.
• 1937 - The U.S. Army Air Forces Weather Service was established (redesignated in 1946 as AWS-Air Weather Service).
• 1939 - Rossby waves were first identified in the atmosphere by Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby who explained their motion. Rossby waves are a subset of inertial waves.
• 1941 - Pulsed radar network is implemented in England during WWII. Generally during the war, operators started noticing echoes from weather elements such as rain and snow.
• 1943 - 10 years after flying into the Washington Hoover Airport on mainly instruments during the August 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac hurricane^[19], J. B. Duckworth flies his airplaine into a Gulf hurricane off the coast of Texas, proving to the military and meteorological community the utility of weather reconnaissance. ^[20]
• 1944 - The Great Atlantic Hurricane is caught on radar near the Mid-Atlantic coast, the first such picture noted from the United States. ^[21]
• 1948 - First correct tornado prediction by R. C. Miller and E. J. Fawbush for tornado in Oklahoma.

- Erik Palmén publishes his findings that hurricanes require surface water temperatures of at least 26°C (80°F) in order to form.

• 1950 - First successful numerical weather prediction experiment. Princeton University, group of Jule Gregory Charney on ENIAC.

- Hurricanes begin to be named alphabetically with the radio alphabet.

- WMO World Meteorological Organization replaces IMO under the auspice of the United Nations.

• 1953 - National Hurricane Center (NOAA) creates a system for naming hurricanes using alphabetical lists of women's names.
• 1954 - First routine real-time numerical weather forecasting. The Royal Swedish Air Force Weather Service.

- A United States Navy rocket captures a picture of an inland tropical depression near the Texas/Mexico border, which leads to a surprise flood event in New Mexico. This convinces the government to set up a weather satellite program. ^[22]

• 1955 - Norman Phillips at Princeton University runs first Atmospheric General Circulation Model.

- NSSP National Severe Storms Project and NHRP National Hurricane Research Projects established. The Miami office of the United States Weather Bureau is designated the main hurricane warning center for the Atlantic Basin. ^[23]

• 1957-1958 - International Geophysical Year coordinated research efforts in eleven sciences, focused on polar areas during the solar maximum.

• 1959 - The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, was launched on 17 February. It was designed to measure cloud cover, but a poor axis of rotation kept it from collecting a notable amount of useful data.
• 1960 - The first weather satellite to be considered a success was TIROS-1, launched by NASA on 1 April. TIROS operated for 78 days and proved to be much more successful than Vanguard 2. TIROS paved the way for the Nimbus program, whose technology and findings are the heritage of most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA and NOAA have launched since then. ^[24]
• 1961 - Edward Lorenz acidentally discovers Chaos theory when working on numerical weather prediction.
• 1962 - Keith Browning and Frank Ludlam publish first detailed study of a supercell storm (over Wokingham, UK). Project STORMFURY begins its 10-year project of seeding hurricanes with silver iodide, attempting to weaken the cyclones. ^[25]
• 1968 - A hurricane database for Atlantic hurricanes is created for NASA by Charlie Newmann and John Hope, named HURDAT. ^[26]
• 1969 - Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale created, used to describe hurricane strength on a category range of 1 to 5. Popularized during Hurricane Gloria of 1985 by media.
• 1970s Weather radars are becoming more standardized and organized into networks. The number of scanned angles was increased to get a three-dimensional view of the precipitation, which allowed studies of thunderstorms. Experiments with the Doppler effect begin.
• 1970 - NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established. Weather Bureau is renamed the National Weather Service.
• 1971 - Ted Fujita introduces the Fujita scale for rating tornadoes.
• 1974 - AMeDAS network, developed by Japan Meteorological Agency used for gathering regional weather data and verifying forecast performance, begun operation on November 1, the system consists of about 1,300 stations with automatic observation equipment. These stations, of which more than 1,100 are unmanned, are located at an average interval of 17 km throughout Japan.
• 1975 - The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES, was launched into orbit. Their role and design is to aid in hurricane tracking. Also this year, Vern Dvorak develops a scheme to estimate tropical cyclone intensity from satellite imagery. ^[27]

- The first use of a General Circulation Model to study the effects of carbon dioxide doubling. Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald at Princeton University.

• 1980s onwards, networks of weather radars are further expanded in the developed world. Doppler radar is becoming gradually more common, adds velocity information.
• 1982 - The first Synoptic Flow experiment is flown around Hurricane Debby to help define the large scale atmospheric winds that steer the storm.
• 1988 - WSR-88D type weather radar implemented in the United States. Weather surveillance radar that uses several modes to detect severe weather conditions.
• 1992 - Computers first used in the United States to draw surface analyses.
• 1998 - Improving technology and software finally allows for the digital underlaying of satellite imagery, radar imagery, model data, and surface observations improving the quality of United States Surface Analyses.

- CAMEX3, a NASA experiment run in conjunction with NOAA's Hurricane Field Program collects detailed data sets on Hurricanes Bonnie, Danielle, and Georges.

• 1999 - Hurricane Floyd induces fright factor in some coastal States and causes a massive evacuation from coastal zones from northern Florida to the Carolinas. It comes ashore in North Carolina and results in nearly 80 dead and $4.5 billion in damages mostly due to extensive flooding.

[edit] 21st century

• 2001 - National Weather Service beings to produce a Unified Surface Analysis, ending duplication of effort at the Tropical Prediction Center, Ocean Predicition Center, Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, as well as the National Weather Service offices in Anchorage, AK and Honolulu, HI. ^[28]
• 2003 - NOAA hurricane experts issue first experimental Eastern Pacific Hurricane Outlook.
• 2004 - A record number of hurricanes strike Florida in one year, Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.
• 2005 - A record 27 named storms occur in the Atlantic. National Hurricane Center runs out of names from its standard list and uses Greek alphabet for the first time.
• 2007 - The Fujita scale is replaced with the Enhanced Fujita Scale for National Weather Service tornado assessments.

[edit] See also

• List of Atlantic hurricane seasons
• List of Pacific hurricane seasons
• List of Pacific typhoon seasons
• List of North Indian cyclone seasons

[edit] References

1. ^ Aristotle [350 B.C.E] (2004). Meteorology (in English). The University of Adelaide Library, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005: eBooks@Adelaide. “Translated by E. W. Webster” 
2. ^ Aristotle, [350 B.C.E.]
3. ^ Timeline of geography, paleontology (English) (HTML). Paleorama.com. “Following the path of Discovery”
4. ^ Jacobson, Mark Z. (June 2005). Fundamentals of Atmospheric Modeling (paperback), 2nd, New York: Cambridge University Press, 828. ISBN 9780521548656. 
5. ^ Jacobson, 2005.
6. ^ Jacobson, 2005
7. ^ Jacobson, 2005.
8. ^ Dorst, Neal, FAQ:_Hurricanes,_Typhoons,_and_Tropical_Cyclones:_Hurricane_Timeline, Hurricane_Research_Division,_Atlantic_Oceanographic_and_Meteorological_Laboratory,_NOAA, January 2006.
9. ^ Millikan, Frank Rives, JOSEPH_HENRY:_Father_of_Weather_Service, 1997, Smithsonian Institution
10. ^ Dorst, [2006]
11. ^ Dorst, 2006
12. ^ Dorst, 2006
13. ^ Jacobson, 2005.
14. ^ Dorst, 2006
15. ^ Reynolds, Ross (2005). Guide to Weather (paperback) (in English), Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books Ltd., 208. ISBN 1554071100. 
16. ^ Norwegian_Cyclone_Model, webpage from NOAA Jetstream online school for weather.
17. ^ Dorst, 2006
18. ^ 75th anniversary of starting aerological observations in Russia (Russian). EpizodSpace.
19. ^ Roth, David, and Hugh Cobb, Virginia_Hurricane_History:_Early_Twentieth_Century, July 16, 2001.
20. ^ Dorst, 2006
21. ^ Dorst, 2006
22. ^ Dorst, 2006
23. ^ Dorst, 2006
24. ^ Dorst, 2006
25. ^ Dorst, 2006
26. ^ Dorst, 2006
27. ^ Dorst, 2006
28. ^ Unified_Surface_Analysis_Manual.