In many ways he was ahead of his time. He soon learnt that forecasting was a thankless task — the public remembered only the predictions that went wrong, and he soon became ridiculed in quite vitriolic correspondence in the letters page of The Times. Even august bodies such as the Royal Society felt his forecasts undermined credible science.
On another battlefront, FitzRoy’s superiors grew increasingly alarmed at the publicity he was attracting and the ballooning budget of what was supposed to be a modest service for reporting the weather, not forecasting it. Eventually the criticism grew so loud it led to FitzRoy’s mental collapse and suicide. In the history of meteorology, though, he is now recognised as a giant in modern weather forecasting.
Of the landmarks mentioned is 1959 when the Met. Office got their first computer. I just remember this as my first job was in the Napier Shaw building at Dunstable as a general dogsbody that year. Part of the job was looking after the paper tapes that fed the Ferranti computer which made a massive 30,000 calculations a second! I believe the current computer makes 1,000 billion. Much can sure change in 50 years.
Edited by weather ship, 06 September 2010 - 13:26 .
