Challenges and Opportunities in Numerical Weather Prediction Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

In 1922 Lewis Fry Richardson published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Richardson 1922), a vision for how atmospheric dynamical equations could be used to predict weather. Selling for about $2 with a print run of 750 copies, the book was not a commercial success; Richardson’s vision was impractical at the time (Lynch 2006). Decades before the development of high-speed telecommunication, satellites, and computers, a global forecast required use of a “forecast factory” with a workforce of 64,000 human “computers” calculating the algorithms by hand in unison. And even if that were available, a full understanding of how best to apply the dynamical equations was not yet fully understood, and indeed, Richardson failed to remove high-frequency waves from his own calculations, leading to an unrealistic, unstable forecast solution (Lynch 2006). Nevertheless, Lewis Fry Richardson understood the feasibility of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and demonstrated how it could be done.