The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson's Dream

by Peter Lynch

Lewis Fry Richardson dreamt that scientific weather prediction would one day become a practical reality. Before his ideas could bear fruit several advances were needed: better understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere; stable computational algorithms to integrate the equations; regular observations of the free atmosphere; and powerful automatic computer equipment. By 1950 advances in all these fronts were sufficient to permit the first computer forecast to be made. Over the ensuing fifty years progress in numerical weather prediction has been dramatic. Weather prediction and climate modelling have now reached a high level of sophistication. This book, first published in 2006, tells the story of Richardson's trial forecast, and the fulfilment of his dream of practical numerical weather forecasting. It includes a complete reconstruction of Richardson's forecast, and analyses in detail the causes of his failure. This will appeal to everyone involved in numerical weather forecasting, from researchers and graduate students to professionals.

Genres: Mathematics

290 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

Peter Lynch is Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at University College Dublin and a maths fanatic. In his retirement Peter continues his research in dynamical meteorology and expounds the awesome wonders of maths in his blog, That's Maths, with a fortnightly column of the same name for The Irish Times.

Reviews

[Simon Dobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very technical examination of the world's first numerical weather "prediction" – although in fact it was really a "postdiction", taking detailed data and using it to compute a scenario that could be compared against a known ground truth. It was an incredible achievement anyway, performing manually and at low resolution the calculations now routinely performed by computers.

Richardson was the person who saw that this would be possible, realising that the physics and mathematics could be solved even though the computational capabilities didn't exist. In this he foresaw the emergence of the modern power of data, where the existence of more and better data transforms both the way we do science and the sciene that we do. It's something that should put him alongside Turing and Von Neumann as visionaries of what computation could achieve.