Empirical Factors in Weather Forecasting

Abstract

IT is an interesting feature of the recent great advance in the art of weather forecasting that it has proceeded in independence of such small store of empirical precepts as had already been gathered in the long ages of crude observation. So far as can be made out by the layman, the official forecasts we see are direct inferences from a number of exactly recorded measurements of air pressures gathered from a very wide area. How far any unmeasurable element, such as could be called a flair for the behaviour of weather, comes into the transaction, we do not know. The tendency of scientific meteorology is no doubt and very rightly to discourage dependence on any such aptitude, and there is no reason to suppose that, if it exists, it is any more common among professional meteorologists than it is in the general public. We do not expect a professional psychologist to be especially tactful any more than we expect a professional mathematician to be particularly sharp in counting his change.