Researched
Numerical weather prediction
Weather prediction became a physics calculation: in 1950 the ENIAC computer produced the first numerical forecast.
Open in the interactive tree →Lewis Fry Richardson tried it by hand in 1922 and failed. Charney, Fjørtoft and von Neumann ran it on ENIAC in 1950, and the calculation took about as long as the weather itself. Faster computers and better data have since added roughly a day of useful forecast skill per decade.
Prerequisites
- Newtonian Mechanics1687
- Partial Differential Equations1747Forecasts integrate the PDEs of fluid motion on a grid
- Thermodynamics1824Forecast models solve the thermodynamic energy and gas laws for the atmosphere
- Weather maps and services1854
- Radiosonde1929-1930Upper-air soundings supply the initial data for forecasts
- Programmable Computer1941
Unlocks
- Chaos Theory1963Lorenz found chaos in a simplified weather model run on a computer
- Climate models1967
- AI weather models2025
- A theory of turbulenceopen