{"id":2016,"date":"2011-01-25T21:40:04","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T02:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2011-01-25T21:46:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T02:46:34","slug":"the-first-numerical-weather-prediction-on-eniac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2011\/01\/the-first-numerical-weather-prediction-on-eniac\/","title":{"rendered":"The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington<\/a> gave me some papers to read on the first successful numerical weather prediction, done on ENIAC<\/a> in 1950, by a team of meteorologists put together by John von Neumann<\/a>. von Neumann was very keen to explore new applications for ENIAC, and saw numerical weather prediction as an obvious thing to try, especially as he’d been working with atmospheric simulations for modeling nuclear weapons explosions. There was, of course, a military angle to this – the cold war was just getting going, and weather control was posited as a potentially powerful new weapon. Certainly that was enough to get the army to fund the project.<\/p>\n

The original forecast took about 24 hours to compute (including time for loading the punched cards), for a 24-hour forecast. This was remarkable, as it meant that with a faster machine, useful weather prediction was possible. There’s a very nice account of the ENIAC computations in:<\/p>\n