How scientists used transformative new technologies to understand
the complexities of weather and the atmosphere, told through the
intertwined careers of three key figures. "The goal of meteorology
is to portray everything atmospheric, everywhere, always," declared
John Bellamy and Harry Wexler in 1960, soon after the successful
launch of TIROS 1, the first weather satellite. Throughout the
twentieth century, meteorological researchers have had global
ambitions, incorporating technological advances into their
scientific study as they worked to link theory with practice.
Wireless telegraphy, radio, aviation, nuclear tracers, rockets,
digital computers, and Earth-orbiting satellites opened up entirely
new research horizons for meteorologists. In this book, James
Fleming charts the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of
atmospheric science through the lives and careers of three key
figures: Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951), Carl-Gustaf Rossby
(1898-1957), and Harry Wexler (1911-1962). In the early twentieth
century, Bjerknes worked to put meteorology on solid observational
and theoretical foundations. His younger colleague, the innovative
and influential Rossby, built the first graduate program in
meteorology (at MIT), trained aviation cadets during World War II,
and was a pioneer in numerical weather prediction and atmospheric
chemistry. Wexler, one of Rossby's best students, became head of
research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, where he developed new
technologies from radar and rockets to computers and satellites,
conducted research on the Antarctic ice sheet, and established
carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
He was also the first meteorologist to fly into a hurricane-an
experience he chose never to repeat. Fleming maps both the
ambitions of an evolving field and the constraints that checked
them-war, bureaucracy, economic downturns, and, most important, the
ultimate realization (prompted by the formulation of chaos theory
in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz) that perfectly accurate measurements
and forecasts would never be possible.
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