Lewis Fry Richardson

Lewis Fry Richardson published his book 'Weather Predication by Numerical Process' in 1921. In it he laid out the earliest formulae and calculations for numerical weather prediction and described how a forecast might be produced in a pre-computing age. His understanding of how a room full of "computors" (people) might produce a forecast essentially described the operation of a supercomputer decades before such a thing existed.

In 1913 Lewis Fry Richardson had been appointed Superintendent of Eskdalemuir Observatory. His main role was to investigate the application of mathematical equations to modelling the atmosphere with the aim of developing new methods of forecasting. His aim was to help the office move away from synoptic forecasting by developing the concept of numerical weather prediction where forecasting was based entirely on the laws of physics. Richardson was a Quaker and felt he could no longer work for the Office when it moved to a war footing. Following the failure of his requests to leave and join a Red Cross unit or the Ambulance Corps, he resigned and joined a Friends’ Ambulance Unit as a driver. Whilst serving in France he also continued to work on his research and even worked through a complete example with data obtained from colleagues in Norway. The calculations took Richardson more than six weeks to produce a six-hour forecast for just one location. While this first forecast was not accurate, later science has proven that it would have been had be applied data smoothing techniques which had not yet been invented, his pioneering method was eventually to be proved correct.

The draft of his seminal work ‘Weather Prediction by Numerical Process’ laid out numerical modelling, the use of gridded data, and even described the working of a modern computer albeit using human beings. 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’ (not computers as we know today, but mathematicians tasked with ‘computing’) would be needed to calculate weather forecasts in real time, each responsible for one small part of the globe. It was lost for some months after being sent behind the lines to safety before the Battle of Champagne but eventually turned up under a heap of coal. The book was published in 1921, forty years before the existence of the first computers capable of turning his dreams into reality. Richardson returned to the office for a brief time after the end of the war, working on concepts including turbulence and fractals, but after the office transferred to the Air Ministry, which had connections to military activity, he resigned once again and ceased all involvement with mainstream research. Although he did not live quite long enough to see the first practical testing of Numerical Weather Prediction, Richardson was excited to see the potential demonstrated by early experiments in 1950 and wrote that they represented an ‘enormous scientific advance’.