History of Meteorology

Scientific Measurement

It was not until Rene Descartes's Les Météores (1637 CE.) that an attempt was made to establish the scientific basis of meteorology. Meteorology was nothing more than observational speculation prior to the scientific age, when devices for measuring and studying weather were invented, and the keeping of systematic weather records began. Galileo Galilei invented the water thermometer for measuring absolute temperatures in 1593, and may have constructed the first thermoscope for measuring temperature changes in 1607. Evangelista Torricelli invented (1643) the mercury barometer that detected atmospheric pressure changes, making possible the observation that drops [Page 508]in pressure substantially correlate with the advent of storms (in 1644). Blaise Pascal noted, in 1648, that atmospheric pressure decreased with increasing altitude, deducing a vacuum above the Earth's atmosphere, and, in 1667, Robert Hooke invented the anemometer for measuring wind speed.

Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit created the mercury thermometer with his temperature scale in 1714, followed by Anders Celsius's alternative temperature scale in 1735, which was adopted in Napoleon's empire in the early 1800s. The daily observation of basic changes in air pressure, moisture, and the direction and speed of the wind was instituted by Laurent Lavoisie in 1765. Horace de Saussure's hair hygrometer (1780) for determining humidity provided the last major instrumentation, and one of the final measuring standards necessary to move meteorology from observation into research and theorization. Luke Howard's cloud classification system (1802) and Francis Beaufort's wind speed scale (1806) provided additional observational tools.

Interpretation of the Data

The scientific roots of climatology, a subdiscipline of meteorology until the late 20th century, were planted in the work of Edmund Halley s 1686 mapping of the trade winds and his assertion of a relationship between solar heating and atmospheric change. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), sometimes credited as the first American meteorologist, observed that North American weather systems move west to east, discovered lightning was electricity (1752), charted the Gulf Stream, linked volcanic eruptions to weather changes, and associated deforestation with climate change. The German H.W. Brandes drew the first weather map in 1819.

Controversies based on the interpretation of the data began to increase as the number of government and academic-related weather observation and recording programs burgeoned in the United States in the first quarter of the 19th century. The most notable of these was the storm controversy (1834–59) involving William Redfield, James Espy, and Robert Hare, concerning the nature, cause, and methodology for studying storms.

Though never resolved, the controversy gave impetus to increasing observational networks and the theoretical understanding and application of meteorology by the U.S. military, the Franklin Institute, the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Philosophi-cal Society. Samuel FB. Morse's telegraph and Morse code made the more rapid dissemination and analysis of this increasingly abundant information possible. The Army Signal Corps began using the telegraph in 1849, to disseminate daily weather observations through the U.S. Department of War, and in the same year, the Smithsonian began producing daily weather maps from telegraphic information.

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