Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman - Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Environmental Engineering Surveying and Geomatics Engineering |
| Learning Resource Type: | Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: | WWW |
| Author(s): |
Randy Alfred
Organization: Wired Magazine |
| Description: | "1870: President Ulysses S. Grant signs a bill creating what we now call the National Weather Service. Forecasting models were simple but generally effective. It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather was moving. The telegraph finally made that possible. The Smithsonian Institution in 1849 began supplying weather instruments to telegraph companies. Volunteer observers submitted observations to the Smithsonian, which tracked the movement of storms across the country. Several states soon established their own weather services to gather data. Congress thought the nation needed a centralized weather office, and that the new system would be best served by military precision and discipline. Hence, the resolution signed by President Grant in 1870 required the Secretary of War: to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories ... and for giving notice on the northern [Great] Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms. The War Department assigned the new function to the Signal Service Corps, where Brig. Gen. Albert J. Myer matter-of-factly named the new unit the Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce. The network went online Nov. 1, 1870. Observers at 24 stations in the eastern United States started taking synchronized readings at 7:35 a.m. and telegraphing them to the division's headquarters in Washington, D.C." Image caption: Sometimes you can see the weather coming, but often that's not soon enough. This time-lapse photograph captures multiple cloud-to-ground lightning strokes during a nighttime thunderstorm in Norman, Oklahoma, in March 1978. Photo: NOAA. |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | lightening, weather, weather forecasting, National Weather Service |
| Usage Tip | |
| Use of Resource: | The bureau was renamed the National Weather Service in 1970, when it joined the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in the Commerce Department's newly created National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. |
| Difficulty: | Easy |
| Interactivity Level: | Very Low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | 2009 |
| Platform/Format: | WWW |
| Cost: | Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.wired... |
| Metadata: | IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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