Something in the air

The DEPARTMENT of ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
presents a seminar by:

DR. JAMES R. FLEMING
COLBY COLLEGE
WATERVILLE, MAINE

“EVERYTHING ATMOSPHERIC, EVERYWHERE ALWAYS” A HISTORY OF ATMOSPHERIC
RESEARCH 1900 - 1960

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER  26, 2014
2:30 P.M. – Room 223 (Refreshments served at 2:15 pm)
Environmental & Natural Resource Sciences Bldg.
14 College Farm Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Abstract:
This big picture history of atmospheric research in the first six decades of the twentieth century features the work of Vilhelm Bjerknes, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Harry Wexler, and their associates spanning two world wars and the Cold War, a period of dramatic social and technological flux, from Marconi wireless and the Wright Flier to digital computing and weather satellites, from Roentgen and Becquerel rays to outdoor nuclear testing. Collectively, Bjerknes, Rossby, and Wexler were scientific entrepreneurs, public-minded champions of something larger than themselves, something entirely new and useful. They made meteorology into a physical science, expanded observations to a global scale, developed new techniques of weather analysis and forecasting, built new theoretical models, founded new institutions, trained new people, responded to societal needs, and appropriated the most promising new technologies to establish the foundations of the atmospheric sciences.

Their stated goal was to portray “everything atmospheric, everywhere, always,” and they pursued a Laplacian ideal of precise measurement and prediction.  Henri Poincaré had warned, circa 1900, that perfect observations of nature were not possible, noting that, “small differences in the initial conditions would produce very great ones in the final phenomena.” Sixty years later, at a landmark conference on numerical weather prediction in Tokyo in 1960, Edward N. Lorenz demonstrated that weather systems have a "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," a founding insight of chaos theory that established a new agenda.