Lewis Fry Richardson is remembered by meteorologists as the father of numerical weather prediction, forecasting the weather by computer.
In the early years of this century, he devised a method by which the future pressure pattern could be calculated if the present state of the atmosphere were accurately known. He used a number of equations which encapsulated many of the known principles of physics, like Boyle's Law and Newton's Laws of Motion, and his forecasting technique consisted of applying these equations repeatedly to advance the forecast in short time-steps.
The theory seemed plausible, but it was a method without a means. An intimidating amount of calculation was involved, and there seemed no practicable way in which the technique could be implemented.
With tongue in cheek, Richardson suggested that what was needed was a "weather factory" with 64,000 workers, whom - somewhat prophetically - he called "computers".
"Imagine a large hall," he wrote, "like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe, and a myriad of computers are at work upon the weather at the part of the map at which each one sits."
Nonetheless, Richardson was determined that his methodology be tested. During the first World War he found himself in 1917 serving as an ambulance driver in the Champagne district of France.
For much of his time there he worked near the front line, and it was in these extraordinary conditions that he carried out one of the most remarkable calculational feats ever accomplished. As he put it himself: "My office was a heap of hay in a cold rest billet."
He used as his starting point the weather observations for 7 a.m. on May 20th, 1910, 88 years ago today, and over a period of several months painstakingly worked through the calculations to produce a six-hour forecast.
He published his results in 1922 in a book called Weather Prediction by Numerical Process that has become one of the classics of meteorology. But it was disappointing at the time. Richardson's forecast predicted pressure changes of up to 150 hectopascals in the sixhour period, a totally unrealistic figure.
The arrival of the electronic computer in the early 1950s, however, changed the scene dramatically. Research with this new tool showed that Richardson's methodology was, in fact, correct. The important difference nowadays is that a technique called "initialisation" is used to smooth out tiny inconsistencies in the original observations. With this improvement, the method works, and gives a good result.