Met Office remembers Quaker weather scientist
Lewis Fry Richardson estimated 64,000 mathematicians needed to calculate real time weather forecasts
The Met Office has marked the work of the Quaker scientist Lewis Fry Richardson, who, 100 years ago, began numerically forecasting the weather.
The mathematician and scientist pioneered numerical forecasts based on scientific rules, rather than past trends, when he was in charge of the Met Office’s Eskdalemuir observatory in Scotland from 1913-1916.
During world war one the conscientious objector joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit where he carried on his research. In 1922, back at the Met Office, Richardson published his book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, which outlined principles of a forecasting method that is still in use today.
‘As well as his methodology, Richardson described his ideas of what has since been called his “forecast factory”. Imagining a large circular theatre like hall, with a map of the world painted on its walls, he estimated that 64,000 “computers” [mathematicians tasked with computing] would be needed to calculate weather forecasts in real time,’ says the article on the Met Office website.
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