After FitzRoy died, there wasn't a scientist in Britain that knew how
to make a weather forecast.

I came across a book about a man who had discovered the method or at
least one that is in use today. The book alleges that treason in the
official British and US weather offices hampered this invigilator of
new ideas.

To this day, there is no record of when meteorologists began to use
the data they kept records of to make forecasts. Why not?
What was the point of collating vast reams of data and not using it?
It just doesn't make sense.

So Because 55,000 US airmen were sent to their deaths unescorted over
enemy territory in droves of aircraft that could not manoeuvre away
from fighter interceptors, I wanted to see to it that the record was
set straight.

So naturally I posted the idea to uk.sci.weather and
sci.military.naval (you'd think they would be at least vaguely
interested wouldn't you?)

I mean, for crying out loud, weather is the be-all and end all of
naval strategy isn't it?

This is what happened:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.military.naval/browse_frm/thread/6...

What is stored at the moment?

The way that weather model runs fail tells us a great deal about
seismic activity. It would be a shame if the meteorological libraries
around the globe only provided for analysis charts as the forecasts
themselves are more important for earthquake prediction.

What excited Krick was something he picked up in Leipzig from
Professor Gerhard Wieckman. Wieckman told him he had discovered that
there was a systematic progression of local barometric pressures which
registered on a barograph, an instrument for recording air pressures
at the earth's surface:

"I can make long-range forecasts from this,"

Krick was convinced that the Germans were closer to long-range weather
prediction than anyone else. What he learned that day in the German
woods, combined with further researches at CalTech, would have a
bearing on the outcome of the coming war.

"I feel there is a good possibility that we will be able to make
forecasts that go far out-well beyond where people are working today,"
Krick told Dr. Millikan, who directed Krick to press on with his
studies.

Did the weather behave chaotically, as many argued (and still do), or
were there orderly, recurring patterns to it?

Krick and his students began to examine the entire complex of wind
systems for as much of the globe as they could. By diligent search and
persistence they were able to collect weather data going back five
years for most of the Northern Hemisphere-Eastern Asia, the Pacific,
North America, the Atlantic and Europe.

By the late thirties they had established that they could group
barometric pressure patterns and related daily weather in blocks of
six days. They found there was a finite number of these patterns, or
weather types, as they called them, for each octant of the globe, or
for each quadrant of a hemisphere. They were able to classify and
catalogue all weather types occurring within the five years they had
studied.

The six-day weather types became the building blocks, providing a
basis for long-range forecasting. Once a weather type was identified,
the weather across one quadrant of the hemisphere could be predicted
at any location for the next six days.

The pressure configurations for a given type were found to be the same
in winter as in summer, irrespective of conditions at the earth's
surface. This indicated that control did, indeed, come from the upper
atmosphere, far above the earth.

However, the weather associated with each pattern changed with the
seasons.

Thus, if one could determine the sequence in which these weather types
occurred for a month, a season, or years ahead, the way was open to
make ultra long-range weather forecasts. Krick and his associates
would reach this achievement in the late 1950s.

I was at Pensacola beach, Fort Pickens for a dawn stream of columnar...fantastic !

lejitmate bird communications in Fla up, ill lejitimate human interaction down down down