"Invisible in the Storm" is the first book to recount the
history, personalities, and ideas behind one of the greatest
scientific successes of modern times--the use of mathematics in
weather prediction. Although humans have tried to forecast weather
for millennia, mathematical principles were used in meteorology
only after the turn of the twentieth century. From the first
proposal for using mathematics to predict weather, to the
supercomputers that now process meteorological information gathered
from satellites and weather stations, Ian Roulstone and John
Norbury narrate the groundbreaking evolution of modern
forecasting.
The authors begin with Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian physicist
and meteorologist who in 1904 came up with a method now known as
numerical weather prediction. Although his proposed calculations
could not be implemented without computers, his early attempts,
along with those of Lewis Fry Richardson, marked a turning point in
atmospheric science. Roulstone and Norbury describe the discovery
of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which tiny variations in
initial conditions produce large variations in the long-term
behavior of a system--dashing the hopes of perfect predictability
for weather patterns. They explore how weather forecasters today
formulate their ideas through state-of-the-art mathematics, taking
into account limitations to predictability. Millions of
variables--known, unknown, and approximate--as well as billions of
calculations, are involved in every forecast, producing informative
and fascinating modern computer simulations of the Earth
system.
Accessible and timely, "Invisible in the Storm" explains the
crucial role of mathematics in understanding the ever-changing
weather.
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