Culture has rarely tired of speaking about the weather. Pastoral poems detail the seasonal variations in weather ad nauseam, while the term “pathetic fallacy” is often taken to refer to a Romantic poet’s wilful translation of external phenomena – sun, rain, snow – into aspects of his own mind. Victorian novels, too, use weather as a device to convey a sense of time, place and mood: the fog in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), for example, or the wind that sweeps through Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847).
And yet the same old conversations fundamentally changed tense during World War I. Because during the war, weather forecasting turned from a practice based on looking for repeated patterns in the past, to a mathematical model that looked towards an open future.
Needless to say, a lot relied on accurate weather forecasting in wartime: aeronautics, ballistics, the drift of poison gas. But forecasts at this time were in no way reliable. Although meteorology had developed throughout the Victorian era to produce same-day weather maps and daily weather warnings (based on a telegram service that could literally move faster than the wind), the practice of forecasting the weather as it evolved and changed over time remained notoriously inadequate.
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