Abstract:

From a sleepy, little-respected science practiced almost exclusively within the government’s Weather Bureau in 1914, meteorology became a thriving branch of geophysics, carried out by more than ten times as many people by 1945. The development of aviation propelled this transformation. Flight’s importance to national defense provided meteorologists with funding for graduate programs, regular observations of the upper air, and new instruments like the radiosonde.  At the same time, the US military and civilian airlines depended upon the new theoretical models produced by scientists like Carl-Gustav Rossby and Jacob Bjerknes to make flying safe and reliable.  Meteorologists played key roles in Zeppelin flights over the North Pole, airline dispatching, and even massive military operations like the D-Day invasion. But while flying produced enormous gains for meteorology as a scientific discipline, it also separated meteorology from the concerns of the much larger population who never flew.  Modeling the dynamics of the upper air became meteorologists’ primary goal, rather than producing accurate ground-level forecasts or socially useful climatological assessments of environmental catastrophes like the Dust Bowl. This paper uses historical methods to understand the emergence of modern meteorology, while speculating on what might have been lost.