05/02/24
5/2/2024The story of our National Weather Service (NWS) is one of catching up and staying ahead.
For more than 200 years, meteorologists, both amateurs and professionals, have steadily employed new scientific discoveries to gather atmospheric information and use it to predict pending weather conditions. Without their knowledge and messaging, damage from catastrophic events would have been incredibly more severe than it actually was.
Humans have watched the weather for thousands of years, of course, but it wasn’t until the Age of Scientific Discovery and The Enlightenment in the 16th and 17th Centuries that rudimentary accuracy at predicting the weather actually made progress. A number of the Founders who led the American colonies to revolutionary freedom were also avid weather observers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington among them.
Franklin’s experiments with lightning as static electricity are well known. Washington kept meticulous records of weather conditions; he made the last weather entry in his diary at Mount Vernon the day before he died in 1799.
And as would be expected, America’s Renaissance Man, Thomas Jefferson, bought a thermometer from a Philadelphia merchant when he was in town for the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. He noted that the high temperature there on July 4, 1776, was 76 degrees. (Pretty comfortable for a July day in Philadelphia.) He also purchased a barometer, a very rare instrument in America at the time, from the same merchant a few days later.
Jefferson kept methodical weather records at his Monticello home in Virginia from 1772 to 1778. Six years later, while sailing across the Atlantic as America’s newly appointed Minister to France in July 1784, he faithfully recorded the daily temperature on each of the 19 days of his ship’s crossing.
Other Americans followed the Founders’ lead. Through the first half of the 1800s weather observation networks grew and expanded across the nation. The telegraph was the key to active meteorology during that period. It enabled observers rapidly to collect, plot, and analyze weather data at one location, a tremendous advance.
In 1849 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington provided weather instruments to telegraph companies to facilitate a functioning network. The telegrams came to the Smithsonian, which then used them to create rudimentary weather maps. That year 150 volunteers across the U.S. reported observations on a regular basis. By the start of the Civil War in 1860, 500 weather stations furnished daily telegrams to the Washington Evening Star newspaper, and the network continued to grow thereafter.
The federal government entered the weather picture in February 1870, more than 150 years ago, when President Ulysses Grant signed a joint congressional resolution requiring the Secretary of War “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent, and at other points in the States and Territories . . . and for giving notice on the northern lakes and on the seacoast, by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms.”
In 1890 the weather service passed to civilian control, where it continued to expand its significance. That year Congress approved a request from President Benjamin Harrison to transfer the weather-related responsibilities of the Signal Service to the newly-created U.S. Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture. Soon the Weather Bureau assumed responsibility for issuing flood warnings along river valleys, with telegraphic reports made at 26 spots on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
Then in 1898 President William McKinley, doubtless in connection with the Spanish-American War of that year, ordered the Weather Bureau to created a hurricane warning network in the West Indies.
Weather observation and prediction have quickly adopted technological and scientific innovations throughout the 20th Century and to the present day. The observations have included collection of data advanced through airplanes for upper atmospheric research, wireless weather reports from ships at sea, free-rising balloon observations, teletype replacement of telegraph and telephone communications, floating instruments mounted on buoys, converted World War Two radar systems, orbiting weather satellites, computerized weather networks, Doppler radar, NOAA weather radio, and today’s increasingly sophisticated hardware and software.
For instance, in 2009 the NWS installed supercomputers that were four times faster than those of the previous generation, able to make an incredible 69.7 trillion calculations per second, in order to provide faster and more accurate forecasts at specific locations.
The trick for the National Weather Service has been to try to keep its techniques and equipment equal to the challenges of increasingly intense weather events, as climate change kicks in with a vengeance in the 21st Century with more frequent and powerful tornados, rainstorms, wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and solar storms.
Americans apparently approve the work of the federal agency. A recent government survey found that the National Weather Service ranks in the top 15 percent of federal agencies, scoring 84 on a scale of 0 to 100, which pegs it in the “excellent” range.
Last week’s heavy weather outbreak across Iowa showed once again the absolutely essential nature of the agency’s work. Congress should keep that fact in mind during federal budget discussions this—and every—year.
