100 years of scientific forecasting

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The Met Office is celebrating a century of scientific forecasting. The Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecast system used today results directly from experiments carried out in the trenches of the First World War.

Met Office mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson recognised that pre-First World War weather forecasting practices were fundamentally unscientific, merely matching current weather phenomena with historic records. While volunteering for the Friends Ambulance Unit at Passchendaele he conducted a series of weather experiments. 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2017/100-years-of-scientific-forecasting