To fully appreciate the modern-day marvel that is the National Weather Service, it’s useful to start with numbers. There’s 6.3 billion. (The number of observations the agency collects and analyzes every day.) There’s 1.5 million. (The number of forecasts it issues each year.) There’s 184 and 100,000. (The number of weather balloons NWS releases every day, including on weekends and holidays, and the number of feet said balloons can rise into the atmosphere.) And there’s 90 percent. (The average accuracy of a five-day forecast.)
There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The ubiquitousness of those updates, the fact that we don’t consider them at all, is a testament to just how much modern meteorology has spoiled us and—probably more than anything else—a tribute to the National Weather Service’s success.
There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The ubiquitousness of those updates, the fact that we don’t consider them at all, is a testament to just how much modern meteorology has spoiled us and—probably more than anything else—a tribute to the National Weather Service’s success.
This blasé attitude would have astounded the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish. They sent letters home describing the climate in apocalyptic terms. When it rained, wrote one colonist in New Sweden, on the Delaware River, “the whole sky seems to be on fire, and nothing can be seen but smoke and flames.” “Intemperate” was how a missionary from Rhode Island described it. “Excessive heat and cold, sudden violent changes of weather, terrible and mischievous thunder and lightning, and unwholesome air” created an environment that was “destructive to human bodies.”
The harshness of the weather—with its extreme seasons and severe storms—wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude. By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat. American settlers could have consulted with the resident experts—the Native Americans who had lived in the eastern part of the continent for thousands of years and knew more about the local climate than anyone else. But they generally didn’t. (“Descriptions of local indigenous knowledge in early colonial narratives,” the historian Sam White noted in his book A Cold Welcome, “are mostly conspicuous by their absence.”)
The harshness of the weather—with its extreme seasons and severe storms—wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude. By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat. American settlers could have consulted with the resident experts—the Native Americans who had lived in the eastern part of the continent for thousands of years and knew more about the local climate than anyone else. But they generally didn’t. (“Descriptions of local indigenous knowledge in early colonial narratives,” the historian Sam White noted in his book A Cold Welcome, “are mostly conspicuous by their absence.”)
The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually. And the tail end of a regional cooling period known as the Little Ice Age was, at the time of the Europeans’ arrival, still exacerbating North American winters. But the colonists had no way of knowing either of these things. Instead, the weather remained an intriguing and stubbornly unpredictable puzzle, one that was soon taken on by the new Americans who began to collect their own data, taking measurements and comparing notes with fellow observers.
A surprising number of Founding Fathers were weather enthusiasts, among them James Madison, the avid storm-tracker Benjamin Franklin (credited, among his other more electrifying feats, with first charting the Gulf Stream), and George Washington, who kept weather diaries on and off, making his final entry on the wintry December day before he died: “Morning Snowing & abt. 3 Inches deep.”
It’s safe to say, however, that no American president was as enthusiastic about meteorology, nor as obsessive in his data collection, as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s first existing weather journal begins on July 1, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For the next 50 years (with some occasional lapses) he meticulously logged his observations in columns that tracked barometric pressure readings, wind speeds, temperature, and other natural phenomena such as frosts and springtime bird sightings. The notes he left are so detailed and extensive that researchers are currently in the process of digitizing them so they can learn more about what those seemingly baffling weather patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth century might tell us about our own.
Jefferson was a proselytizer for weather diaries—he was the one who sold his fellow president Madison on the idea of keeping one—and he communicated with correspondents as far north as Québec and as far south as Mississippi about their observations. Various distractions (serving as minister to France, founding the University of Virginia, a stint as the nation’s third president) prevented him from achieving his dream—“this long-winded project,” he called it—of creating a national meteorological service. If he’d survived another decade or so, he would have been around to see the invention that would revolutionize the field of meteorology and make his vision possible.
That invention was not a scientific tool, it was a communications device. And its inventor was not a scientist, but a painter. In 1837, Samuel F. B. Morse received a patent for his new “Electro Magnetic Telegraph,” which would astonish a crowd of onlookers at its debut seven years later in Baltimore. As the receiving operator decoded the message that had just flashed like magic across a wire from an office miles away in Washington, D.C., no one was thinking about what this incredible new device might mean for the weather. But newly employed telegraph operators with time on their hands quickly caught on. Jeptha Homer Wade, one of the founders of Western Union, would later recall:
A surprising number of Founding Fathers were weather enthusiasts, among them James Madison, the avid storm-tracker Benjamin Franklin (credited, among his other more electrifying feats, with first charting the Gulf Stream), and George Washington, who kept weather diaries on and off, making his final entry on the wintry December day before he died: “Morning Snowing & abt. 3 Inches deep.”
It’s safe to say, however, that no American president was as enthusiastic about meteorology, nor as obsessive in his data collection, as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s first existing weather journal begins on July 1, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For the next 50 years (with some occasional lapses) he meticulously logged his observations in columns that tracked barometric pressure readings, wind speeds, temperature, and other natural phenomena such as frosts and springtime bird sightings. The notes he left are so detailed and extensive that researchers are currently in the process of digitizing them so they can learn more about what those seemingly baffling weather patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth century might tell us about our own.
Jefferson was a proselytizer for weather diaries—he was the one who sold his fellow president Madison on the idea of keeping one—and he communicated with correspondents as far north as Québec and as far south as Mississippi about their observations. Various distractions (serving as minister to France, founding the University of Virginia, a stint as the nation’s third president) prevented him from achieving his dream—“this long-winded project,” he called it—of creating a national meteorological service. If he’d survived another decade or so, he would have been around to see the invention that would revolutionize the field of meteorology and make his vision possible.
That invention was not a scientific tool, it was a communications device. And its inventor was not a scientist, but a painter. In 1837, Samuel F. B. Morse received a patent for his new “Electro Magnetic Telegraph,” which would astonish a crowd of onlookers at its debut seven years later in Baltimore. As the receiving operator decoded the message that had just flashed like magic across a wire from an office miles away in Washington, D.C., no one was thinking about what this incredible new device might mean for the weather. But newly employed telegraph operators with time on their hands quickly caught on. Jeptha Homer Wade, one of the founders of Western Union, would later recall:
I commenced operation in a telegraph office in 1846. With the small amount of commercial business then on the lines, the employees had less to do than they have now, and it was quite common for the operators in different parts of the country to enquire of each other about the weather, such as the direction and force of the wind as nearly as we could guess it, together with the temperature and its changes from time to time at different points. . . . I would frequently write upon the bulletin board in my office, what and when weather changes were coming. Frequently this was with such accuracy as to create considerable comment and wonder.The operators had discovered something both interesting and paradoxical, the writer Andrew Blum observes in his book The Weather Machine. The telegraph had collapsed time but, in doing so, it had somehow simultaneously created more of it. Now people could see what the future held before it happened; they could know that a storm was on its way hours before the rain started falling or the clouds appeared in the sky. This new, real-time information also did something else, Blum points out. It allowed weather to be visualized as a system, transforming static, localized pieces of data into one large and ever-shifting whole.
by Alyson Foster, National Endowment for the Humanities | Read more:
Image: Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie
