Before the Satellite: A Short History of Weather Forecasting
· 14 min read
I should say at the outset that predicting the weather has always been a fundamentally absurd enterprise. The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system with more variables than any civilisation has ever been equipped to measure, and yet we have been trying to guess what it will do next for roughly four thousand years. The fact that we now occasionally succeed is less a testament to human genius than to human stubbornness, which may, in fact, be the same thing.