Word: weathering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before the war, most private meteorologists were rural quacks who went by the phases of the moon or the furriness of caterpillars. The postwar crop is generally more responsible and far more effective. Most of them do not try "to beat the Weather Bureau." Instead, they take Weather Bureau information and extract from it facts of special importance to their customers. They coach oil companies on whether they should evacuate their offshore drilling rigs in the path of a hurricane. Knowledge that evacuation is not necessary may save many thousands of dollars. Small business for the private weathermen is advising...
...future actions of the atmosphere by applying mathematical equations to its current pattern, but they were stopped at once by two difficulties: 1) they did not know the proper equations, and 2) they would have to do so much figuring that they could not keep up with the weather, let alone forecast it. British Meteorologist L. F. Richardson described in 1922 a forecasting center built like a gigantic theater, with 64,000 mathematicians frantically busy with desk computers. A modern computing machine can figure as fast...
...Vladimir Zworykin, inventor of the iconoscope, the first effective television-camera tube, sold the idea to his Princeton neighbor, the great Mathematician John von Neumann. Teaming up with Rossby, who provided the meteorological knowledge, Von Neumann and his brilliant assistant Dr. Jule Charney devised ingenious mathematical tricks to shoehorn weather observations into computing machines...
...numerical forecasting, besides his discovery of the long waves, is his simplified equations, which treat the atmosphere as if it were as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper. Looked at in the large, this is not far from true. The part of the atmosphere that concerns the weather is only some seven miles deep, and it covers the surface of a globe 8,000 miles in diameter. Proportionately, it is much thinner than the skin of an apple...
Electronic Editor. Electronic weather forecasting is now being done with steadily increasing success by the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit at Suitland, Md., where the Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau have pooled their forces. Weather information flows into the machines from both ground stations and upper-air probes. Some 1,400 punched cards cover North America. Other information equally important comes from the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, including Soviet Russia and Communist China. The machine even "edits" the raw data, selecting from masses of figures the special ones wanted, such as air pressure at 18,000 ft. over...