In November 1703, a strange malevolence began to gust through the dark streets of London. Daniel Defoe was walking in his neighborhood on the evening of Wednesday the 24th when “the Wind encreased, and with Squauls of Rain and terrible Gusts blew very furiously.” Those winds whipped tiles from the rooftops, snapped limbs and entire trees, and toppled chimneys, one of which very nearly crushed Defoe. Had he been killed, he never would have given the world Robinson Crusoe, and one of the most famous literary umbrellas of all time. Nor would he have written The Storm, considered by many the first work of modern journalism.
For two more days, the winds swept from the southwest in violent gusts. No one could have imagined they were the outer bands of a storm three hundred miles wide, the largest and most destructive ever to hit the British Isles. When Defoe looked at his barometer on Friday evening the 26th, the mercury was as low as he’d ever seen it. He suspected that “the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children.” (Not a bad guess, since he and his wife, Mary, had seven at that time, ranging in age from two to fourteen.)
Defoe was then a poet and pamphleteer who sold his writing by the sheet. He was also just out of prison. For his most recent pamphlet, a satire on the religious intolerance of high-church Anglicans, he was charged with seditious libel. He was fined two hundred marks, locked in an elevated public pillory—the old wooden chokey with holes for head and hands—and jailed for four months. Now bankrupt, he was desperate for paid work to support his family. On the morning of the 27th when the worst of the fury was past and people began to “peep out of Doors,” Defoe looked out over the destruction and saw a brand-new genre.
Hardly anyone had slept the night before; “the Distraction and Fury of the Night was visible in the Faces of the People.” Many expected their houses to fall in on them, but they could hardly leave, as bricks, tiles, and stones flew through the streets. Unlike any writers of his day, and borrowing from the emerging scientific method, Defoe took detailed notes of his own observations, began to interview eyewitnesses, and set out to gather the grim facts. He visited the Thames to report on the seven hundred or so ships that had been tossed in heaps by the wind. Some of his most vivid reporting came from the Goodwin Sands in the English Channel, where mariners who thought they’d found safety were later washed away.
Defoe’s eyewitness account was revolutionary, but he went much further in collecting detailed, personal storm stories from all over England. Journalism was brand new. Nine months before, London’s one-page Daily Courant launched as the first English-language daily newspaper. Defoe placed ads in the Courant and the London Gazette and wrote to sources all over England asking for storm stories and particulars. The heart of The Storm contains about sixty accounts that Defoe selected, edited, and deemed credible, as “most of our Relators have not only given us their Names, and sign’d the Accounts they have sent, but have also given us Leave to hand their Names down to Posterity with the Record.”
Defoe estimated that the storm drowned 8,000 people at sea, including a fifth of the soldiers in the queen’s navy. It killed 123 Londoners, flattened 300,000 trees, destroyed 900 homes and 400 windmills, and blew away countless church steeples, turrets, and lead roofs, including the one atop Westminster Abbey. Fifteen thousand sheep drowned in the Severn River on the storm surge at high tide.
More than recounting, Defoe tried to explain the storm to his readers. Emerging atmospheric science shows up alongside moral reflection and scripture, barometric readings hand-in-hand with metaphysical rumination. “I cannot doubt but the Atheist’s hard’ned Soul Trembl’d a little as well as his House, and he felt some Nature asking him some little Questions,” Defoe wrote. “Am I not mistaken? Certainly there is some such thing as a God—What can all this be? What is the Matter in the World?”
Searching for answers and counseling his readers, Defoe had done more than crank out the first modern work of journalism. He had issued the first modern weather report.
The earliest-known recorded rain science comes from the ancient Greeks; some of them had begun rolling their eyes at the prevailing belief that rain was sent by the almighty Zeus. In the Aristophanes play The Clouds, Socrates tells the farmer Strepsiades that Zeus doesn’t exist. Strepsiades protests: “No Zeus up aloft in the sky! Then, you first must explain, who it is sends the rain; or I really must think you are wrong.”
Only the clouds can send rain, Socrates tells him:
Was there ever a shower seen to fall in an hour
when the sky was all cloudless and blue?
Yet on a fine day, when the clouds are away,
[Zeus] might send one according to you.
About a century later, Aristotle refined Greek ideas about rain in his scientific treatise Meteorologica. Historians of science note the discourse gets it wrong on almost everything we know about weather phenomena—except rainfall. Aristotle saw rain as part of a sun-driven cycle among air, land, and sea, a rhythm he called “river of Ocean.” Soaking into the earth, rain produced a “wet exhalation,” forming springs as well as rivers that ultimately carried it back to the sea.
By the fourth century B.C., people had figured out some of the appreciable benefits of measuring rainfall; the more you know about what rain’s done in the past, the better you can predict what it will do in the future. The first written reference is from India, in Kautilya’s Arthashastra: “In front of the storehouse, a bowl with its mouth as wide as an Aratni [that’s 18 inches] shall be set up as a Varshanana [rain gauge].” In Palestine, a book recording four hundred years of Jewish life through the second century A.D. reports a year of detailed rainfall and soil-moisture data. But those are isolated instances. The systematic measure of rainfall—still a key to rain science even in the era of weather satellites—would take another thousand years.
The cylinders that catch rain in modern backyards emerged in Korea during the reign of King Sejong the Great, who ruled from 1418 to 1450. A Korean cultural hero to this day, Sejong put a premium on science—especially agricultural technologies to help coax more food from the drought-prone land. Sejong wanted every village in the country to report rainfall back to the crown, a chore that involved inspecting roots and soils for moisture after a storm. His son, the crown prince, is said to have come up with the tubular gauge. King Sejong sent one to every village. Korean historians have a running disagreement about whether Sejong actually used the data, or collected it as a shrewd political move to show he cared about the problems of agriculture.
European weather watchers were using cylindrical catches by the time of the Great 1703 Storm; Defoe reports rainfall amounts captured in observers’ “tunnels.” But it is no surprise that the first rain instruments developed in the East. Legal executions for witchcraft were still well under way in Europe, and scientists were routinely hauled before the Inquisition.
In Italy, Evangelista Torricelli, the young mathematician-physicist who figured out in 1643 that mercury would rise and drop in a glass tube along with air pressure, kept his experiments secret to all but a few trusted compatriots. He’d watched the Inquisition of Galileo by the Church, and had gossipy neighbors who suspected he was up to witchcraft. Torricelli died of a brief and vicious fever when he was thirty-nine years old, before he could perfect his apparatus. In 1663, Robert Boyle named it the barometer—soon the centerpiece in a home weather-prediction craze that spread across Europe and then to America.
Torricelli also gave science its first description of wind, and a lyrical explanation of our place in the atmosphere: Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d’un pelago d’aria—“We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.” But when it came to describing and talking about the rain, neither science nor letters could ever sum it up quite so tidily. Rain’s chaotic nature made it among the hardest parts of the weather to measure—and even to name.
In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, a lorry driver named Rob McKenna is a rain god but doesn’t know it. “All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays,” Adams writes. “All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him.”
McKenna despises rain, but he gets to know it so well that he creates a scale of 231 different types of rainfall. Type 11 is “breezy droplets,” Type 33 a “light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery,” Type 39 “heavy spotting.” Sea storms fall between 192 and 213. Type 127 is “syncopated cab-drumming.” His least-favorite is Type 17, a “dirty blatter, blattering against his windshield so hard that it didn’t make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.”
With its hurly-burlies and nor’easters, rain’s eccentric vocabulary connects to the soggy literary landscapes of Ireland and England: Jonathan Swift is credited with the earliest published version of “raining cats and dogs” in 1738, though an English dramatist named Richard Brome had his dialogue raining “Dogs and Polecats” a century before. Some lexicographers suggest that, during bleak times, heavy rains might well have sent the corpses of drowned dogs and cats down streets and gutters—inspiration for Swift’s gruesome mock pastoral “A Description of a City Shower.”
Cat-and-dog cloudbursts seem practically ordinary compared with “raining young cobblers” in Germany. It rains shoemakers’ apprentices in Denmark, chair legs in Greece, ropes in France, pipe stems in the Netherlands, and wheelbarrows in the Czech Republic. The Welsh, who have more than two dozen words for rain, like to say that it’s raining old women and walking sticks. Afrikaans-speakers have a version that rains old women with knobkerries (that would be clubs). The Polish, French, and Australians all have a twist on raining frogs; the Aussies sometimes call a hard rain a frog-strangler. Portuguese- and Spanish-speakers both might say it’s raining jugs. Inexplicably the Portuguese also say it’s raining toads’ beards, and the Spanish: está lloviendo hasta maridos—it’s even raining husbands! Probably not what the Weather Girls had in mind with their 1982 hit disco single, “It’s Raining Men.”
Around the British Isles, hard rain is commonly described as persisting, pissing, bucketing, lashing, sheeting, stotting, or coming down in stair rods. In Scotland, people might say a heavy rain is chuckin’ it doon, teemin’, skelpit, stoatin’ aff, or bouncin’ aff the streets; a soft one that hangs in the air is a smirr or haar. Light rains have a graceful language with their mizzles and drizzles. In Ireland, a persistent drizzle is known as a “soft day.”
Linguists mapping dialect in the soaking American South collected more than 170 descriptions for rain, including a temperance rain, a tub soaker, a log mover, a lighterd knot floater, a milldam buster, and a potato bed soaker. My southern father seems to have a hundred ways to describe a rain that hasn’t even arrived yet, when the sky is “trying to rain,” “wants to rain,” or is “fixin’ to rain.”
This rich depth of description makes it odd that during the Scientific Revolution, as the bearded men of meteorology decided how to measure, classify, and talk about the atmosphere, they came up with only scant definitions for rain—light, moderate, or heavy, sometimes throwing in a shower or drizzle. The clouds earned themselves a much more elegant lexicon, and so did the wind.
We owe the expressive global language of clouds to an amateur meteorologist in London named Luke Howard, who in 1802 proposed a Latin-based classification that he likened to reading expressions on a person’s face: Clouds “are commonly as good visible indications of these causes (of rain and other weather) as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.”
As a teenager, Howard built a small meteorological station in his parents’ garden with a rain gauge, thermometer, and inexpensive barometer. His mother called the gravel path to the gadgets “Luke’s Walk.” Twice a day, he trekked faithfully down to record rainfall, evaporation, air pressure, wind direction, and high and low temperatures in his slim pocket journals. His father wanted his son’s head out of the clouds, and sent him away for apprenticeship with a chemist. Howard became a pharmacist by profession, but studied meteorology all of his life, writing prolifically on clouds and the climate of London.
Howard’s proposed classification was similar to the Linnaean system being used in botany and zoology, taken from the Latin for easy adoption “by the learned of different nations.” His three primary descriptions: cirrus, from the Latin word for “fiber” or “hair”; cumulus, from the Latin for “heap” or “pile”; and stratus, “layer” or “sheet.” Howard also suggested intermediate cloud types, various blends of the three primary clouds. For the rain cloud, which he saw as a stormy combination of cirrus, cumulus, and stratus, he chose the Latin word for cloud: nimbus.
Nearly a century later, in 1896, the world’s top meteorologists gathered in Paris to mark a ballyhooed “year of the cloud” and release their agreed-upon system of ten types, based around Howard’s names. The International Cloud Atlas is still the official identification guide, although over time, meteorologists have made it a bit clunky; in 1932, they reclassified Howard’s rain cloud as a nimbostratus.
On the 1896 list, the king of clouds—towering cumulonimbus—was listed number nine. This is why, when we feel the highest of high, we say that we are on Cloud Nine. As the British cloud enthusiast Gavin Pretor-Pinney* tells the story, scientists unfortunately rearranged the order in the second edition of the atlas, shifting mighty cumulonimbus to number ten. But the phrase “Cloud Nine” stuck.
Today, International Cloud Atlas descriptions are used worldwide by scientists and fourth grade teachers alike to describe the fair-weather cumulus; the thin, wispy cirrus that often indicate a change in the weather; the low, flat stratus moving in with a drizzle. It’s the nature of science, and also human nature, to organize Earth in universally recognizable ways. Well before globalization, we ordered our nations on maps, our music in scales, our geographic coordinates in long and horizontal lines. Just three years after Howard proposed his cloud nomenclature, a British Royal Navy officer named Francis Beaufort devised a scale for wind speed to give sailors a common way to describe wind and its impact on the sails of ships. The Beaufort Scale, tweaked for modern vessels, is still familiar worldwide. It is brilliantly simple for communicating the complexity of wind, says my science writer friend Scott Huler, who became so obsessed with its poetic elegance that he wrote a book about the scale. Beaufort 0 is “calm,” described this way: “smoke rises vertically.” Beaufort 1 is “light breeze,” one to three miles per hour: “Direction of wind shown by smoke but not by wind vanes.” In Beaufort 12, “hurricane,” “devastation occurs.”
All of which leads to an elephant in the room—a great gray missing from humanity’s ordering of winds, clouds, musical scales, and vodka proofs. Among so many rigorous classifications, we don’t have the same sort of global language for rain. There is no poetic lexicon shared by ship captains and children’s sky-watcher charts, no standard measure for precipitation that falls into the dizzyingly different types of rain gauges used by scientists: the totalizer, the tipping-bucket gauges, the weighing gauges, with various configurations among those and even different ways of measuring what they catch. Inevitably, both rain’s description and its measurement are vernacular, often even personal.
Almost every atmospheric scientist, meteorologist, and weather reporter I interviewed about rain was either obsessed with rainfall as a child—watching it spill from the skies, tracking rain’s runoff, and observing how it puddled and soaked the ground—or had a vivid weather experience in childhood. The latter was often more thrilling than terrifying, as Lance Morrow once well described big weather, “a child’s delight in dramatic disruption.”
So it was with the man called “the father of British rainfall,” George James Symons. G. J. Symons was born in London in 1838 and “while quite young commenced regular observations of the weather.” Historians of science trace his rain obsession to the severe droughts of England in the 1850s; it must have been sorrowful for the young rain watcher to see the skies turn dry.
By the time he was twenty-one, Symons had begun to build an enthusiastic club of rain-gauge readers, and to publish their collective data. The first issue of what would become a lifelong labor of love appeared in 1860 and included rain reports from five hundred stations. The work drew the attention of Robert Fitzroy, who had been tapped by the British government five years before to establish the country’s first weather bureau.
Fitzroy was a distinguished naval captain who commanded HMS Beagle on its famous five-year voyage with Charles Darwin. One hundred and fifty years after Defoe’s harrowing narrative, storms still caught captains by deadly surprise. In 1859 the Royal Charter Storm wrecked the ship for which it was named and as many as two hundred others, drowning more than eight hundred sailors. The loss inspired Fitzroy to develop a system of calculations and a new term, “forecast,” to help alert the public and ship captains to coming weather. Even if imperfect, he believed that sharing rainfall, barometric readings, and other data could help reduce the great numbers of shipwrecks. The idea was enormously controversial in Victorian times. As they tried to save lives by predicting storms, Fitzroy and other public meteorologists were ridiculed as the “government Zadkiel,” a reference to Britain’s most notorious astrologer.
Fitzroy hired Symons as an assistant in 1860. But the young man was so obsessed with his British Rainfall Organisation that Fitzroy felt it took away from his official duties. Symons lasted only three years with the government’s meteorological office. Fitzroy did not last much longer. He committed suicide in 1865 by slashing his throat with a razor. Fellow scientists felt sure it was the pressure of trying to make accurate weather predictions in the face of constant criticism and ridicule. His suicide sharpened the view that forecasting was an immoral pseudo-science. It helped lead to a ban on any public forecasts in England for the next thirteen years, allegedly because of inaccuracies. Darker motives were also at work. For one, the large ship-salvage companies of Cornwall and Devon complained to Parliament that the forecasts were putting them out of business.
Symons went on to collect and publish his rain data privately, which may have been the wiser route given the birthing pains at the British Meteorological Office, known today as the Met. He placed newspaper ads for rainfall observers in every corner of the British Isles. He offered to buy the instruments and train observers “of both sexes, all ages, and all classes.” By 1865, the British Rainfall Organisation had a thousand reporting stations, by 1876 two thousand, and by 1898 three thousand. The dedicated volunteers checked their gauges at 9 a.m. every day, logged inches of rainfall on charts supplied by Symons, and sent them in once or twice a year.
Symons also dug up every historical record he could find, appealing for ships’ logs and old weather journals so that he could reconstruct past weather. He ultimately gathered some seven thousand sets of records that let him build a reliable picture of rainfall all the way back to 1815.
With kind, crinkly eyes and a full Victorian beard, Symons was “a man of singularly genial manner making a friend of almost everyone with whom he came in contact, even those with whom he differed,” a fellow meteorologist said of him. He maintained a patient and masterful correspondence with his rain army, sometimes cajoling, reprimanding, or polling the observers on various weather questions. He painstakingly recorded their thousands of annual readings, with town, observer’s name, elevation, and total inches, in his annual publication British Rainfall.
The loyal rain-gauge readers in turn helped fund the organization with donations and subscriptions to his magazines. In addition to the measurements, British Rainfall carried anomalies and records from the year and exhaustive explanations of how to measure rain—on different terrains, for light rains, snows, and heavy rains, and how to note the total in decimal points by hundredths of an inch: “Vulgar fractions should never be employed.”
Another publication, Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, covered an astonishing variety of phenomena. The first volume, in 1866, ran features on a “new enemy to rain gauges”—the leaf-cutter bee; meteor showers; the migration of swallows; various floods and droughts; and an investigation into black rains, which we will encounter later.
By 1870, Fitzroy’s successors realized what the Met had lost in Symons and his rain obsession. But Symons rejected offers to bring his network back to the public sphere. He told his observers their important rain work would not be pushed into “an obscure corner in some Government office.” Such a move would undermine his own “enormous expenditure of money, time and physical and mental energy,” and moreover mean the rain group’s “esprit du corps would be extinguished.”
When Symons died in 1900, he left no survivors, having lost his father when he was a young boy, then his mother, his only child in infancy, and his wife fifteen years before. But he was mourned by a family of thousands of fellow rain watchers. By all accounts he died a happy man, for having devoted his life to British rainfall.
Americans did not have the same qualms as the Victorian Brits about the voodoo of weather forecasting. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of setting up stations of weather instruments and deputies around the nation, but he was foiled by the Revolutionary War. Later, the telegraph made scientific forecasting tangible. Then and now, the best way to know how the weather is going to behave at your place is to ask its most recent host. In 1847—three years after Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message, “What hath God wrought?” from Washington to Baltimore—America’s first government meteorologist, the “Storm King,” James Pollard Espy, pitched the idea of a national weather network connected by telegraph lines. Espy sold the notion to Joseph Henry, director of the brand-new Smithsonian Institution, who sold it to his board by stressing that telegraphing weather from the far western and southern reaches of the nation would “furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm.”
By 1860, five hundred stations across the United States telegraphed weather reports to Washington. War, again, set back the effort; the network crumbled after the secession of the southern states. At the Cincinnati Observatory in Ohio, a young astronomer named Cleveland Abbe became so frustrated by the lack of public storm and flood warnings that he took on forecasting as a personal mission. With funding from the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, Abbe developed a system of telegraphic weather reports, daily weather maps, and predictions he compiled and shared via the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Western Union supplied outline maps, to which Abbe or a telegraph clerk could add symbols showing wind direction, areas of high and low pressure, and other details. Abbe designed the familiar triangular arrows and codes on hand-drawn forecast maps, with the “R” for rain. For the first time, Americans could read not only current weather conditions, but “probabilities,” as Abbe called his forecasts, for the days to come.
Abbe’s service was immediately popular. Only thirty years old, he became known as “Old Probabilities” or “Old Prob.” It also became clear that forecasting could save many lives and ships. A petition from the Great Lakes region—which suffered 1,914 shipwrecks in 1869 alone—urged Congress to establish a meteorology agency and national telegraphic weather service to track “the origin and progress of these great storms.”
Congress approved, and in early 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a resolution that the secretary of war should head up meteorological observations in military stations across the nation, as well as “notice on the northern lakes and seacoasts, by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms.” Gen. Albert J. Myer, the army’s chief signal officer and a personal friend of Grant, had pulled strings to secure weather in the War Department. Now, instead of shrinking in peacetime, the Signal Office could grow. Myer turned out to be as dedicated to forecasting as to devising the signal system. He quickly hired Abbe away from the Cincinnati Observatory. Abbe cranked out his daily Probabilities and trained a generation of meteorologists in the art of forecasting. Myer’s signaling, developed for war, now grew into a system of flags that flew in cities and seaports to warn of coming storms. When he died in 1880, one newspaper tribute said “no careful seaman ventures out of port when the red light is burning or the red flag flying.”
To this day, if you see a red flag flying with a black square in the center, be warned of the storm to come—and say a little thanks to General Myer and the U.S. Signal Service.
In a storm-gray federal government building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, 160 scientists and other employees of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center work with weather records as new as satellite images transmitted a minute ago, and as old as the 1740s. The 20 million pages of observations, many handwritten, and billions more computerized records here represent the largest archive of weather data anywhere in the world. Logs of ship captains and military officers reporting in from around the globe are filed twenty-five feet high in the basement. “Your faithful servant,” many of them sign off, in elegant, rounded script.
“A dash of rain” is an oft-repeated entry from the nineteenth century, the measure then as common as our dash of salt.
“The rain was driven with the force of arrows into my face, and the oppression was similar to what one feels riding on a fast horse at a riding pace,” reads a harsh 1831 observation by the naval engineer William Redfield of New York, who subjected himself to storms as he worked to figure out the circular nature of cyclones.
If there is a common link in rain science past and present, it is a certain mystification. For countless reasons beyond the storm warnings that save lives, we humans have an insatiable will to divine rain—to manage the water supply of major cities, to figure out when to plant winter wheat, to plan an outdoor concert or choose a wedding date. But even as modern meteorology improves upon the old probabilities, rain is eminently difficult to predict or to count on. It’s the classic example of chaos theory; as pontificated by Jeff Goldblum to Laura Dern in Jurassic Park: “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” The real scientist behind the butterfly theory was the late MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the first to recognize that tiny, faraway triggers can change the weather in ways that make it impossible for mathematical models to predict. Your weather app can’t tell you that it’s about to rain old women and walking sticks in front of your house—while your backyard remains completely dry. It may not have predicted any rain at all.
Meteorologist Scott Stephens, a child cloud-watcher who knew his life’s work by the time he was five years old, is charged with answering the National Climatic Data Center’s public requests for weather knowledge past and predicted. Beyond the billion hits on the agency’s website, he fields calls from police detectives and insurance investigators who need to know how much rain fell at the hour of a crime or accident scene; dam engineers seeking annual averages; construction bosses deciding whether to hire a crew; and the occasional crank who has figured out how to control hurricanes. (We’ll get to that a little later.) These and the ten thousand other interested parties who call the center every year could find the historical data and predictions online, but they want the human insight. “Weather models do a great job forecasting temperatures, they do a great job of forecasting wind speed and direction,” Stephens tells me. “The models have a more difficult time with precipitation.”
This is true even in the Big Data age of supercomputers that crunch billions of global weather readings every day—from Earth-orbiting satellites; radars; ground sensors at thousands of stations; thousands more buoys and ships at sea; aircraft weather chasers; and one thousand beige weather balloons with white boxes known as radiosondes attached, launched every morning and afternoon from points around the world. (If ever you stumble upon a large, deflated balloon tethered to a plain white box, possibly making disconcerting noises and giving off a sulfuric stink, don’t be alarmed, and return to sender in the postage-paid mailer inside.)
In the late 1940s, the military gave the Weather Bureau what became one of its most valuable tools for predicting rainfall—25 surplus radars, launching the age of weather surveillance. That network has grown to include 155 Doppler radars that let meteorologists peer into the clouds, and LIDAR, remote-sensing laser beams that can simulate floods. The United States and Japan jointly operate a satellite mission dedicated to measuring global rainfall. All of this data pours into NOAA’s superspeed weather-prediction computers, which can crunch trillions of calculations a second, making forecasting more accurate all the time. Today’s four-day rain outlook is as accurate as the one-day forecast of thirty years ago. The satellites and supercomputers have particularly sharpened forecasts for tropical storms; the National Hurricane Center nailed Hurricane Sandy’s southern New Jersey landfall five days out.
Yet rain continues to defy Big Data—routinely washing out zeropercent predictions as well as the pronouncement by the former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson of “a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear.” What’s fascinating about high-tech rain forecasts is the degree to which they are improved by human meteorologists like Stephens. National Weather Service statistics show meteorologists improve rain-forecast accuracy 25 percent over computer guidance alone.
Just as computer rain forecasts still need the instincts of human meteorologists, they benefit from the physical collection of rain—measured in gauges around the world—over radar and satellite imagery alone. For the Colorado state climatologist Nolan Doesken, this truth hit achingly close to home nearly twenty years ago. The National Weather Service’s Nexrad (next-generation Doppler weather radar) failed to detect freakish rainfall variation in a storm that developed directly over Fort Collins, where Doesken lives. On July 28, 1997, many residents were lulled to sleep by the sound of rain drumming on rooftops, with no warning of what was to come. Before midnight, the storm poured two inches of rain over much of the region, but hurtled fourteen inches onto southwest Fort Collins. The rains swelled docile Spring Creek to a flash flood that swamped homes and sent families scrambling up trees and rooftops in their pajamas. Five people were washed to their deaths. Doesken has never forgiven himself for not making a call that night to the Weather Service; he never imagined the radar was not picking up such fierce rains.
The disaster led Doesken to launch a network of volunteer rainfall observers, known as the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, who take rain gauge readings at home and report them over the Internet. What began as a small local project has grown to 30,000 weather watchers around the United States who are building a database of highly local precipitation measurement. (About half of them consistently check their gauges every morning.) The physical data has proven invaluable for scientists, especially when it comes to rain’s variability. A Texas volunteer once reported seven inches of rain in his Comal County gauge, while nearby volunteers reported no rain or a couple hundredths of an inch. Meteorologists were sure it was a typo until they looped back through the radar to find a tiny, short-lived convective storm that had formed and died in the same spot, circling the dedicated rain volunteer like the rain clouds chasing lorry driver Rob McKenna.
In April 2014, a storm carrying more rain than had hit the region in any hurricane of the past century swamped Florida’s Panhandle, turning parts of Pensacola into sea and eating away chunks of the scenic coastal highway. The storm knocked out power to the official weather station at the Pensacola airport, but a number of the network’s volunteers corroborated the extreme rainfall—reporting as much as 20 inches in one day—allowing scientists to confirm a new record. “The high-tech stuff will increasingly win the day,” Doesken told me, “but it will win it better if it’s ground-truthed” with credible measurement of rain falling in the backyards of tens of thousands of citizen scientists.
Doesken is a modern-day G. J. Symons (with salt-and-pepper mustache rather than Victorian beard), corresponding with his thousands of volunteers and meeting them in person when he travels. Most are older than fifty-five and so committed to the work that their families contact Doesken when they pass away. He writes back letters of condolence, not a duty he expected when he became a meteorologist. “These volunteers don’t realize just how important their records can be,” Doesken says. “Most of them find it interesting, but they don’t realize that it can also be lifesaving.”
Because we so urgently need to know what they know—every day, or even every hour—meteorologists have had to share their knowledge more publicly than most experts. From the earliest days of Fitzroy’s forecasts in Britain and Abbe’s Probabilities in America, a more parasitic group of weather watchers stuck close to the meteorologists like barnacles. Journalists were eager for weather news, the number one interest of most of their newspaper readers then; readers, listeners, viewers, and Internet users now.
My colleague Bill Kovarik, a professor of journalism and environmental history at Unity College in Maine, says early American journalists devoted ink to the weather long before the U.S. Weather Bureau existed. The Niles’ Weekly Register, the most popular publication in the nation before the New York Times debuted in 1851, and then the Times, were both committed to weather reporting in the nineteenth century. Niles’ Weekly ran lengthy reports on the atmosphere in its science section; in 1849, the magazine published an analysis of national rainfall patterns atop an update on aerial navigation and another on “the importance of fresh air.” The Times was covering weather regularly by 1857, and had a daily weather report by the 1870s.
The addition of a newspaper weather map was a coup for newsmen who wanted to hook their readers, and weathermen who wanted their forecasts to reach a larger audience. With the help of the telegraph, meteorologists began making national weather maps in 1848; Joseph Henry hung one up for visitors each morning on the wall of the Smithsonian. In 1875 The Times of London became the first paper to print one daily. The New York Times began running one in 1934, and the next year, the Associated Press started to transmit a national map to its member papers. The early newspaper weather maps contained much more meteorological science than today’s: isotherms—the lines that connect points with the same temperature—to help readers see where weather fronts were moving in; Abbe’s little arrows to show direction; areas of high and low pressure. Like most things in newspapers, the maps were dumbed down steadily over the century, until they carried little besides temperature—and of course, the rain.
By 1900, the U.S. Weather Bureau had moved from the War Department to the Department of Agriculture, which helped set up the first radio weather broadcasts at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Most fledgling radio stations shuttered during World War I, but UW’s stayed on air, broadcasting weather news to ships sailing on the Great Lakes. During the New Deal, the Weather Bureau got much more involved with local radio, beginning a long history of love-hate relationships between the agency’s meteorologists and local broadcasters who shared or hyped their forecasts.
The archetypal weatherman with his authority and verve was born not of TV, but of radio. One of the classics was Jimmie Fidler, still a student at Ball State University when he became “Radio’s Original Weatherman” at WLBC in Muncie, Indiana. His show opened like this:
By telephone, telegraph, teletype, radio and the mail, WLBC’s own meteorologist, Jimmie Fidler, “Radio’s original weatherman,” gathers the information on the weather as it is and as it is to be. Now, here is Jimmie with his maze of weather data that he will unravel into a simple and complete picture of the weather.
When a handful of experimental television stations began broadcasting in the early 1940s, Fidler signed on with Cincinnati’s WNBT, where he maintained his persona—trusty purveyor of “authentic weather information”—as TV’s first weatherman. Other early approaches to TV weather hinted at the oddball art to come. New York City’s first television weathercast debuted on October 14, 1941, and starred an animated sheep. Wooly Lamb, sponsored by Botany Wrinkle-Proof Ties, introduced each segment with a song: “It’s hot, it’s cold. It’s rain. It’s fair. It’s all mixed up together. But I, as Botany’s Wooly Lamb, predict tomorrow’s weather.” The meteorologist Robert Henson, author of several books about weather and two on the history of broadcast meteorology, calls Wooly the “harbinger of weather’s eventual segregation from other television news.”
Wooly remained on air for an astonishing seven years, but the early days of TV weather forecasting were mostly somber and serious. Many of the first broadcasters were World War II veterans who parlayed their meteorological skills into jobs in the nascent TV field.
The Federal Communications Commission inadvertently encouraged cheeseball TV weather in 1952 when it opened up competition for local station licenses. Most major cities went from one station to two or three. News managers vying for audience share found weather was the easiest news to liven up. “The result was TV weather’s wildest and most uninhibited period,” Henson writes, “the age of puppets, costumes, and ‘weathergirls.’ ”
The Nashville poet-forecaster Bill Williams gave the weather in verse: “Rain today and rain tonight / Tomorrow still more rain in sight.” In St. Louis, a puppet “weather lion” gave the nightly forecast. In New York, a sleepy bombshell in a short nightie gave the midnight forecast as she tucked herself into bed.
Weary of the indignities of fatuous forecasting, the American Meteorological Society tried to rein it in with a system of credentialing. “Many TV ‘weathermen’ make a caricature of what is essentially a serious and scientific occupation,” the physics professor and Philadelphia weathercaster Francis Davis complained in a 1955 TV Guide piece, “Weather Is No Laughing Matter.”
David Letterman didn’t get the memo. Broadcasting the weather at his hometown station WLWI in Indianapolis out of college, Letterman “joked about ‘hailstones the size of canned hams,’ ” Henson writes, “cited statistics for made-up cities, and once congratulated a tropical storm for reaching hurricane status.”
Numerous stations hired meteorologists in the 1960s, but buffoonery—or beauty—continued to trump credentials. Before she became a movie star and sex symbol, Raquel Welch got her start doing morning weather in San Diego as Raquel Tejada, KFMB’s “Sun-Up Weather Girl.” The accomplished ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer landed her first job out of Wellesley in 1967 as “weathergirl” for her hometown TV station, Louisville, Kentucky’s WLKY. Besides her lack of meteorology experience, Sawyer recounts how she wasn’t allowed to wear her glasses on camera despite terrible eyesight. She couldn’t tell whether she was pointing to the West or East Coast on the weather map.
Meteorologists would put up with many more years of gimmicks before weathercasting became serious again. On NBC’s Today show, Willard Scott delivered the weather dressed up as Carmen Miranda. “A trained gorilla could do this job every night,” Scott once said of the forecaster’s job. A very large gorilla, indeed, was about to change the profession.
With a wide smile and an even wider tie, John Coleman was the consummate 1970s weatherman, combining serious tweed-jacket forecasting with showmanship. Good Morning America launched in 1975 with Coleman as weather anchor. Breakfast tables tuned to him for seven years, and then his weather-broadcast dream came true.
Coleman believed the short time devoted to weather on TV—typically fifteen minutes a day—was inadequate for what viewers wanted and modern life demanded. He dreamed of a twenty-four-hour national cable network devoted exclusively to the weather. He spent every moment away from his day job developing the concept, figuring out how to program and staff an all-weather channel, and flying around the nation in search of a deep-pocketed financial partner. The partner would turn out to be Frank Batten, who had inherited a regional newspaper company, Landmark Communications, and turned it into one of the largest privately held media conglomerates in the nation.
Venture capitalists were skeptical of Coleman’s plan. Batten could see what they could not. That’s because he had been gobsmacked by weather since age six, when he and his uncle rode out a ferocious Category 4 storm, the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane of 1933, in the family’s oceanfront cottage on Virginia Beach.
Coleman had many ingenious innovations. One was the proprietary technology to fit local forecasts and weather alerts into national programming. He insisted that all Weather Channel forecasters be trained meteorologists. And he convinced the National Weather Service to become the prominent source of information for the channel. For years, federal meteorologists felt bitter as the on-air TV personalities earned fame using their forecasts and data without attribution. TV broadcasters also might fail to report a warning or overhype one. The Weather Channel and National Weather Service struck a deal that got every warning issued by NWS out to viewers. It would be the greatest visibility government meteorologists ever had.
The Weather Channel launched on May 2, 1982, and rode out stormy years. The early technology garbled the local forecasts. Critics dismissed the channel as a joke. Coleman was a genius weather broadcaster but did not impress as CEO. Landmark invested $32 million to start the channel, and through ’82 and ’83 lost $850,000 a month. The company tried to push Coleman out, he fought back, and a rough legal battled resulted in a settlement that felt like a lose-lose.
By summer 1983, the board was preparing to shut down the channel. Viewership was so small that Nielsen barely registered it. Even if they didn’t sit around watching it, though, Americans liked having the Weather Channel, and the nation’s cable operators knew it. In the end, the operators saved the channel by agreeing to subscriber fees to keep it afloat. Starting in 1984, the fees coincided with the huge wave of growth in cable TV through the mid-1990s. The channel also found revenue in cheesy infomercials: “Heat-wave alert” for Gatorade, “Cold-wave alert” for Quaker Oats, and “Weather and Your Health”—sponsored with no apparent irony by the fake bacon condiment Bac-Os.
The Weather Channel broke even after five years but continued to struggle with tiny ratings. The lack of pizzazz became obvious only in hindsight. Coleman had a strict “no remote feeds” policy—no live broadcasts from the field—because the technology was notoriously poor and expensive. The idea was for the forecasters to stay inside—and give viewers the weather information they needed to go outside.
As video equipment became better and cheaper, the channel’s meteorologists began flipping this formula: They got out in the rain, while viewers stayed dry on their living room couches. It proved an incredibly appealing role reversal. Reporting from the field was a “sea change in our understanding of the emotional connection” people have with weather, said then-CEO Deborah Wilson. The macho meteorologist Jim Cantore cherishes his personal turning point. He’d been stuck behind a desk at the Weather Channel ever since he graduated from college in 1986, talking in front of weather maps. As Hurricane Andrew, Category 5, bore down in August 1992, a producer stretched thin for live feeds with other staffers in Miami asked Cantore if he’d like to pack a bag and cover Andrew’s second landing in Louisiana.
Reporting on the weakened hurricane from his Baton Rouge hotel with the window smashed and the rain gusting in, Cantore expressed a love for storm drama that infected viewers. “It was awesome, the wind and the rain,” Cantore says. “It wasn’t a huge impact for Louisiana as it was for Florida, but it was awesome. It was my first one.”
The Weather Channel streamed into the homes of 50 million Americans during Andrew; soon it was 100 million. In 2008, NBC and a pair of private-equity firms bought the channel for $3.5 billion. The man with the twenty-four-hour weather dreams didn’t see a penny. Coleman’s settlement with the company had required him to turn over his 75,000 shares of stock, and since the Weather Channel was insolvent at the time, he received nothing.
Coleman landed as the local weatherman at KUSI-TV in San Diego, where his career took a surprising turn for someone who had devoted his life to explaining the atmosphere. In his seventies, he became an outspoken skeptic of human-caused climate change, using his platform to debunk science on the air, in local speeches, and on Fox News. He called global warming “the greatest scam in history.” He joined an estimated quarter of television meteorologists, who, faced with the difficulty of forecasting tomorrow’s weather, disputed the ability of climate scientists to make predictions fifty and a hundred years out. Wheel of Fortune’s host Pat Sajak, who began his television career as TV weatherman for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, also turned in old age to spinning doubt about climate change.
Of course, climate scientists don’t claim to predict the daily rainfall in fifty years, but the change in climatic conditions, a distinction that most meteorologists respect. Scientists and writers have come up with many good metaphors for the difference between climate and weather, such as the idea that climate is all the clothes in our closet, weather the outfit that we wear on a particular day. Or climate is what you expect—weather is what you get. (This and many other weather witticisms are often falsely attributed to Mark Twain. While Twain had many clever thoughts on weather, he did not conceive every atmospheric aphorism of human history.) My favorite analogy for climate and weather sees climate as the personality and weather as the mood. So weather is the mood of the atmosphere on any given day, in a specific place. Climate is the atmosphere’s true personality—the average of these weather moods over many years.
I looked up Alan Sealls, chief meteorologist at WKRG in Mobile, Alabama, so that I could interview a weather broadcaster in the rainiest metro area in the United States. We made arrangements to chat about what it’s like to forecast in a city with 100 percent chance of rain all summer long. But global warming and its impact on rainfall had become such a big story that we ended up talking mostly about climate change. In 2009, Sealls won a science-reporting award from the American Meteorological Society for his extensive series, “The Truth About Global Warming,” during a time when most of his colleagues around the nation considered the topic “Kryptonite,” in the words of one. Sealls has become a trusted voice on climate change and the human influence—even in a skeptical state. He stands at the crossroads of another profound shift in the profession. He is the best of the old weathermen, with a huge smile and personality to match; the best of the broadcast scientists, with a master’s in meteorology; and the best of a new kind of weather watcher, helping the public understand one of the most complicated and urgent stories of our time.
He talks to his viewers about the long-term climate—at the same time he advises them to pack a raincoat today.
* Author of a lovely book called The Cloudspotter’s Guide, Pretor-Pinney is also founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society: cloudappreciationsociety.org.