An Economic History of Weather Forecasting

Erik D. Craft, University of Richmond

Introduction

The United States Congress established a national weather organization in 1870 when it instructed the Secretary of War to organize the collection of meteorological observations and forecasting of storms on the Great Lakes and Atlantic Seaboard. Large shipping losses on the Great Lakes during the 1868 and 1869 seasons, growing acknowledgement that storms generally traveled from the West to the East, a telegraphic network that extended west of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard, and an eager Army officer promising military discipline are credited with convincing Congress that a storm-warning system was feasible. The United States Army Signal Service weather organization immediately dwarfed its European counterparts in budget and geographical size and shortly thereafter created storm warnings that on the Great Lakes alone led to savings in shipping losses that exceeded the entire network’s expenses.

Uses of Weather Information

Altering Immediate Behavior

The most obvious use of weather information is to change behavior in response to expected weather outcomes. The motivating force behind establishing weather organizations in England, France, Germany, and the United States was to provide warnings to ships of forthcoming storms, so that the ships might remain in harbor. But it soon became obvious that agricultural and commercial interests would benefit from weather forecasts as well. Farmers could protect fruit sensitive to freezes, and shippers could limit spoilage of produce while en route. Beyond preparation for severe weather, weather forecasts are now created for ever more specialized activities: implementing military operations, scheduling operation of power generation facilities, routing aircraft safely and efficiently, planning professional sports teams’ strategies, estimating demand for commodities sensitive to weather outcomes, planning construction projects, and optimizing the use of irrigation and reservoir systems’ resources.

Applying Climatological Knowledge

Climatological data can be used to match crop varieties, construction practices, and other activities appropriately to different regions. For example, in 1947 the British Government planned to grow groundnuts on 3.2 million acres in East and Central Africa. The groundnut was chosen because it was suited to the average growing conditions of the chosen regions. But due a lack of understanding of the variance in amount and timing of rainfall, the project was abandoned after five years and initial capital outlays of 24 million British pounds and annual operating costs of 7 million pounds. The preparation of ocean wind and weather charts in the 1850s by Matthew Fontaine Maury, Superintendent of the U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, identified better routes for vessels sailing between America and Europe and from the United States East Cost to United States West Coast. The reduced sailing durations are alleged to have saved millions of dollars annually. Climatological data can also be used in modern environmental forecasts of air quality and how pollution is dispersed in the air. There are even forensic meteorologists who specialize in identifying weather conditions at a given point in time after accidents and subsequent litigation. Basic climatological information is also one reason why the United States cinema industry became established in Southern California; it was known that a high percentage of all days were sunny, so that outdoor filming would not be delayed.

Smoothing Consumption of Weather-Sensitive Commodities

An indirect use of weather forecasts and subsequent weather occurrences is their influence on the prices of commodities that are affected by weather outcomes. Knowledge that growing conditions will be poor or have been poor will lead to expectations of a smaller crop harvest. This causes expected prices of the crop to rise, thereby slowing consumption. This is socially efficient, since the present inventory and now smaller future harvest will have to be consumed more slowly over the time period up until the next season’s crop can be planted, cultivated, and harvested. Without an appropriate rise in price after bad weather outcomes, an excessive depletion of the crop’s inventory could result, leading to more variability in the consumption path of the commodity. People generally prefer consuming their income and individual products in relatively smooth streams, rather than in large amounts in some periods and small amounts in other periods. Both improved weather forecasts and United State Department of Agriculture crop forecasts help buyers more effectively consume a given quantity of a crop.

The History Weather Forecasts in the United States

An important economic history question is whether or not it was necessary for the United States Federal Government to found a weather forecasting organization. There are two challenges in answering that question: establishing that the weather information was socially valuable and determining if private organizations were incapable of providing the appropriate level of services. Restating the latter issue, did weather forecasts and the gathering of climatological information possess enough attributes of a public good such that private organizations would create an insufficiently large amount of socially- beneficial information? There are also two parts to this latter public good problem: nonexcludability and nonrivalry. Could private producers of weather information create a system whereby they earned enough money from users of weather information to cover the costs of creating the information? Would such a weather system be of the socially optimal size?

Potential Organizational Sources of Weather Forecasts

There were many organizations during the 1860s that the observer might imagine would benefit from the creation of weather forecasts. After the consolidation of most telegraphic service in the United States into Western Union in 1866, an organization with employees throughout the country existed. The Associated Press had a weather-reporting network, but there is no evidence that it considered supplementing its data with forecasts. One Ebenezer E. Merriam began supplying New York newspapers with predictions in 1856. Many years later, astronomer turned Army Signal Service forecaster Cleveland Abbe concluded that Merriam made his predictions using newspaper weather reports. The Chicago Board of Trade declined an invitation in 1869 to support a weather forecasting service based in Cincinnati. Neither ship-owners nor marine insurers appear to have expressed any interest in creating or buying weather information. Great Lakes marine insurers had even already overcome organizational problems by forming the Board of Lake Underwriters in 1855. For example, the group incurred expenses of over $11,000 in 1861 inspecting vessels and providing ratings on behalf of its members in the annual Lake Vessel Register. The Board of Lake Underwriters even had nine inspectors distributed on the Great Lakes to inspect wrecks on behalf of its members. Although there was evidence that storms generally traveled in a westerly direction, none of these groups apparently expected the benefits to itself to exceed the costs of establishing the network necessary to provide useful weather information.

Cleveland Abbe at the Cincinnati Observatory began the most serious attempt to establish a quasi-private meteorological organization in 1868 when he sought financial support from the Associated Press, Western Union, local newspapers, and the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. His initial plan included a system of one hundred reporting stations with the Associated Press covering the $100 instrument costs at half of the stations and the dispatch costs. In the following year, he widened his scope to include the Chicago Board of Trade and individual subscribers and proposed a more limited network of between sixteen and twenty-two stations. The Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, whose president published the Cincinnati Commercial, funded the experiment from September through November of 1869. Abbe likely never had more than ten observers report on any given day and could not maintain more than about thirty local subscribers for his service, which provided at most only occasional forecasts. Abbe continued to receive assistance from Western Union in the collection and telegraphing of observations after the three-month trial, but he fell short in raising funds to allow the expansion of his network to support weather forecasts. His ongoing “Weather Bulletin of the Cincinnati Observatory” was not even published in the Cincinnati Commercial.

Founding of the Army Signal Service Weather Organization

Just as the three-month trial of Abbe’s weather bulletin concluded, Increase A. Lapham, a Milwaukee natural scientist, distributed his second list of Great Lakes shipping losses, entitled “Disaster on the Lakes.” The list included 1,164 vessel casualties, 321 deaths, and $3.1 million in property damaged in 1868 and 1,914 vessel casualties, 209 lives lost, and $4.1 million in financial losses in 1869. The number of ships that were totally destroyed was 105 and 126 in each year, respectively. According to a separate account, the storm of November 16-19, 1869 alone destroyed vessels whose value exceeded $420,000. Lapham’s list of losses included a petition to establish a weather forecasting service. In 1850, he had prepared a similar proposal alongside a list of shipping of losses, and twice during the 1850s he had tracked barometric lows across Wisconsin to provide evidence that storms could be forecast.

Recipients of Lapham’s petitions included the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the National Board of Trade meeting in Richmond, a new Chicago monthly business periodical entitled The Bureau, and Congressman Halbert E. Paine of Milwaukee. Paine had studied meteorological theories under Professor Elias Loomis at Western Reserve College and would introduce storm-warning service bills and eventually the final joint resolution in the House that gave the Army Signal Service storm-warning responsibilities. In his book Treatise on Meteorology (1868), Loomis claimed that the approach of storms to New York could be predicted reliably given telegraphic reports from several locations in the Mississippi Valley. From December 1869 through February 1870, Lapham’s efforts received wider attention. The Bureau featured nine pieces on meteorology from December until March, including at least two by Lapham.

Following the Civil War, the future of a signaling organization in the Army was uncertain. Having had budget requests for telegraph and signal equipment for years 1870 and 1871 cut in half to $5000, Colonel Albert J. Myer, Chief Signal Officer, led a small organization seeking a permanent existence. He visited Congressman Paine’s office in December of 1869 with maps showing proposed observation stations throughout the United Stations. Myer’s eagerness for the weather responsibilities, as well as the discipline of the Army organization and a network of military posts in the West, many linked via telegraph, would appear to have made the Army Signal Service a natural choice. The marginal costs of an Army weather organization using Signal Service personnel included only instruments and commercial telegraphy expenses. On February 4, 1870, Congress approved the Congressional Joint Resolution which “authorizes and requires the Secretary of War to provide for taking of meteorological observations . . . and for giving notice on the northern lakes and on the sea-coast of the approach and force of storms.” Five days later, President Grant signed the bill.

Expansion of the Army Signal Service’s Weather Bureau

Observer-sergeants in the Signal Service recorded their first synchronous observations November 1, 1870, 7:35 a.m. Washington time at twenty-four stations. The storm-warning system began formal operation October 23, 1871 with potential flag displays at eight ports on the Great Lakes and sixteen ports on the Atlantic seaboard. At that time, only fifty general observation stations existed. Already by June 1872, Congress expanded the Army Signal Service’s explicit forecast responsibilities via an appropriations act to most of the United States “for such stations, reports, and signal as may be found necessary for the benefit of agriculture and commercial interests.” In 1872, the Signal Service also began publication of the Weekly Weather Chronicle during the growing seasons. It disappeared in 1877, reemerging in 1887 as the Weather Crop Bulletin. As the fall of 1872 began, confidence in the utility of weather information was so high that 89 agricultural societies and 38 boards of trade and chambers of commerce had appointed meteorological committees to communicate with the Army Signal Service. In addition to dispensing general weather forecasts for regions of the country three times a day, the Signal Service soon sent special warnings to areas in danger of cold waves and frosts.

The original method of warning ships of dangerous winds was hoisting a single red flag with a black square located in the middle. This was known as a cautionary signal, and Army personnel at Signal Service observation stations or civilians at display stations would raise the flag on a pole “whenever the winds are expected to be as strong as twenty-five miles per hour, and to continue so for several hours, within a radius of one hundred miles from the station.” In the first year of operation ending 1 September 1872, 354 cautionary signals were flown on both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard, approximately 70% of which were verified as having met the above definition. Such a measure of accuracy is incomplete, however, as it can always be raised artificially by not forecasting storms under marginal conditions, even though such a strategy might diminish the value of the service.

The United States and Canada shared current meteorological information beginning in 1871. By 1880, seventeen Canadian stations reported meteorological data to the United States at least twice daily by telegraph. The number of Army Signal Service stations providing telegraphic reports three times a day stabilized at 138 stations in 1880, dipped to 121 stations in 1883, and grew to approximately 149 stations by 1888. (See Table 1 for a summary of the growth of the Army Signal Service Meteorological Network from 1870 to 1890.) Additional display stations only provided storm warnings at sea and lake ports. River stations monitored water levels in order to forecast floods. Special cotton-region stations, beginning in 1883, comprised a dense network of daily reporters of rainfall and maximum and minimum temperatures. Total Army Signal Service expenditures grew from a $15,000 supplemental appropriation for weather operations in fiscal year 1870 to about one million dollars for all Signal Service costs around 1880 and stabilized at that level. Figure 1 shows the extent geographical extent of the Army Signal Service telegraphic observation network in 1881.

Figure 1: Army Signal Service Observation Network in 1881
Click on the image for the larger, more detailed image (~600K)Source: Map between pages 250-51, Annual Report of the Chief Signal Officer, October 1, 1881, Congressional Serial Set Volume 2015. See the detailed map between pages 304-05 for the location of each of the different types of stations listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Growth of the United States Army Signal Service Meteorological Network

Sources: Report of the Chief Signal Officer: 1888, p. 171; 1889, p. 136; 1890, p. 203 and “Provision of Value of Weather Information Services,” Craft (1995), p. 34.

Notes: The actual total budgets for years 1870 through 1881 are estimated. Stations of the second order recorded meteorological conditions three times per day. Most immediately telegraphed the data. Stations of the third order recorded observations at sunset. Repair stations maintained Army telegraph lines. Display stations displayed storm warnings on the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard. Special river stations monitored water levels in order to forecast floods. Special cotton-region stations collected high temperature, low temperature, and precipitation data from a denser network of observation locations

Early Value of Weather Information

Budget reductions in the Army Signal Service’s weather activities in 1883 led to the reduction of fall storm-warning broadcast locations on the Great Lakes from 80 in 1882 to 43 in 1883. This one-year drop in the availability of storm-warnings creates a special opportunity to measure the value of warnings of extremely high winds on the Great Lakes (see Figure 2). Many other factors can be expected to affect the value of shipping losses on the Great Lakes: the level of commerce in a given season, the amount of shipping tonnage available to haul a season’s commerce, the relative composition of the tonnage (steam versus sail), the severity of the weather, and long-term trends in technological change or safety. Using a statistical technique know as multiple regression, in which the effect of these many factors on shipping losses are analyzed concurrently, Craft (1998) argued that each extra storm-warning location on the Great Lakes lowered losses by about one percent. This implies that the storm-warning system reduced losses on the Great Lakes by approximately one million dollars annually in the mid 1870s and between $1 million and $4.5 million dollars per year by the early 1880s.

Source: The data are found in the following: Chicago Daily Inter Ocean (December 5, 1874 p. 2; December 18, 1875; December 27, 1876 p. 6; December 17, 1878; December 29, 1879 p. 6; February 3, 1881 p. 12; December 28, 1883 p. 3; December 5, 1885 p. 4); Marine Record (December 27, 1883 p. 5; December 25, 1884 pp. 4-5; December 24, 1885 pp. 4-5; December 30, 1886 p. 6; December 15, 1887 pp 4-5); Chief Signal Officer, Annual Report of the Chief Signal Officer, 1871- 1890.

Note: Series E 52 of the Historical Statistics of the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975) was used to adjust all values to real 1880 dollars.

There are additional indirect methods with which to confirm the preceding estimate of the value of early weather information. If storm-warnings actually reduced the risk of damage to cargo and ships due to bad weather, then the cost of shipping cargo would be expected to decline. In particular, such reductions in shipping prices due to savings in losses caused by storms can be differentiated from other types of technological improvements by studying how fall shipping prices changed relative to summer shipping prices. It was during the fall that ships were particularly vulnerable to accidents caused by storms. Changes is shipping prices of grain from Chicago to Buffalo during the summers and falls from the late 1860s to late 1880s imply that storm-warnings were valuable and are consistent with the more direct method estimating reductions in shipping losses. Although marine insurance premia data for shipments on the Great Lakes are limited and difficult to interpret due the waning and waxing of the insurance cartel’s cohesion, such data are also supportive of the overall interpretation.

Given Army Signal Service budgets of about one million dollars for providing meteorological services to the entire United States, a reasonable minimum bound for the rate of return to the creation of weather information from 1870 to 1888 is 64 percent. The figure includes no social benefits from any weather information other than Great Lakes storm warnings. This estimate of nineteenth century information implies that the creation and distribution of storm warnings by the United States Federal Government were a socially beneficial investment.

Transfer of Weather Services to the Department of Agriculture

The Allison Commission hearings in 1884 and 1885 sought to determine the appropriate organization of Federal agencies whose activities included scientific research. The Allison Commission’s long report included testimony and discussion relating to the organization of the Army Signal Service, the United States Geological Survey, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Navy Hydrographic Office. Weather forecasting required a reliable network of observers, some of whom were the sole Army personnel at a location. Advantages of a military organizational structure included a greater range of disciplinary responses, including court-martials for soldiers, for deficient job performance. Problems, however, of the military organization included the limited ability to increase one’s rank while working for the Signal Service and tension between the civilian and military personnel. In 1891, after an unsuccessful Congressional attempt at reform in 1887, the Weather Bureau became a civilian organization when it joined the young Department of Agriculture.

Aviation and World War I

Interest in upper air weather conditions grew rapidly after the turn of the century on account of two related events: the development of aviation and World War I. Safe use of aircraft depended on more precise knowledge of weather conditions (winds, storms, and visibility) between takeoff and landing locations. Not only were military aircraft introduced during World War I, but understanding wind conditions was also crucial to the use of poison gas on the front lines. In the most important change of the Weather Bureau’s organizational direction since transfer to the Department of Agricultural, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act in 1926, which by 1932 led to 38% of the Weather Bureau’s budget being directed toward aerology research and support.

Transfer of the Weather Bureau to the Department of Commerce

Even though aerological expenditures by the Weather Bureau in support of aviation rivaled funding for general weather services by the late 1930s, the Weather Bureau came under increasing criticism from aviation interests. The Weather Bureau was transferred to the Department of Commerce in 1940 where other support for aviation already originated. This transition mirrored the declining role of agriculture in the United States and movement toward a more urban economy. Subsequently known as the United States Weather Service, it has remained there since.

World War II

During World War II, weather forecasts assumed greater importance, as aircraft and rapid troop movements became key parts of military strategy. Accurate long-range artillery use also depended on knowledge of prevailing winds. For extensive use of weather forecasts and climatological information during wartime, consider Allied plans the strike German oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania. In the winter of 1943 military weather teams parachuted into the mountains of Yugoslavia to relay weather data. Bombers from North Africa could only reach the refineries in the absence of headwinds in either direction of the sortie. Cloud cover en route was important for protection, clear skies were helpful for identification of targets, and southerly winds permitted the bombers to drop their ordinance on the first pass on the south side of the area’s infrastructure, allowing the winds to assist in spreading the fire. Historical data indicated that only March or August were possible windows. Though many aircraft were lost, the August 1 raid was considered a success.

Tide, wind, and cloud conditions were also crucial in the planning of the invasion of Normandy (planned for June 5 and postponed until June 6 in 1944). The German High Command had been advised by its chief meteorologist that conditions were not opportune for an Allied invasion on the days following June 4. Dissention among American and British military forecasters nearly delayed the invasion further. Had it been deferred until the next date of favorable tide conditions, the invasion would have taken place during the worst June storm in twenty years in the English Channel.

Forecasting in Europe

A storm on November 14, 1854 destroyed the French warship Henri IV and damaged other British and French vessels on the Black Sea involved in the Crimean War. A report from the state-supported Paris Observatory indicated that barometric readings showed that the storm has passed across Europe in about four days. Urban Leverrier, director of the Paris Observatory, concluded that had there been a telegraph line between Vienna and the Crimea, the British and French fleets could have received warnings. Although the United States weather network was preceded by storm-warning systems in the Netherlands in 1860, Great Britain in 1861, and France in 1863, the new United States observation network immediately dwarfed the European organizations in both financial resources and geographical magnitude.

Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle during Darwin’s famous voyage, was appointed director of the Meteorological Department established by the British Board of Trade (a government organization) in 1854. The wreck of the well-constructed iron vessel Royal Charter in a storm with much loss of life in October of 1859 provided another opportunity for a meteorological leader to argue that storms could be tracked and forecast. With support from the Prince Consort, FitzRoy and the Meteorological Department were granted approval to establish a storm-warning service. On February 6, 1861 the first warnings were issued. By August 1861 weather forecasts were issued regularly. By 1863, the Meteorological Department had a budget of three thousand English pounds. Criticism arose from different groups. Scientists wished to establish meteorology on a sound theoretical foundation and differentiate it from astrology. At the time, many publishers of weather almanacs subscribed to various theories of the influence of the moon or other celestial bodies on weather (This is not as outlandish one might suppose; in 1875, well-known economist William Stanley Jevons studied connections between sunspot activity and meteorology with business cycles). Some members of this second group supported the practice of forecasting but were critical of FitzRoy’s technique, perhaps hoping to become alternative sources of forecasts. Amidst the criticism, FitzRoy committed suicide in 1865. Forecasts and warnings were discontinued in 1866 until the warnings resumed two years later. General forecasts were suspended until 1877.

In 1862, Leverrier wrote the French Ministry of Public Education that French naval and commercial interests might be compromised by their dependence on warnings from the British Board of Trade. A storm-warning service in France commenced in July of 1863. Given the general movement of storms westward, neither France nor Britain had the luxury of tracking storms well before they arrived, as would have been possible with the November 1854 storm in the Crimea and as the Army Signal Service soon would be able to do in America. On account of administrative difficulties that were to hinder effective functioning of the service until 1877, French warnings ceased in October 1865 but resumed in May the next year. The French Central Bureau Meteorology was founded only in 1878 with a budget of only $12,000.

After the initiation of storm warning systems that preceded the Army Signal Service weather network, Europe would not achieve meteorological prominence again until the Bergen School of meteorology developed new storm analysis techniques after World War I, which incorporated cold and warm fronts. In the difficult days in Norway during the conclusion of the Great War, meteorological information from the rest of Europe was unavailable. Theoretical physicist turned meteorological researcher Wilhelm Bjerknes appealed to Norway’s national interests in defense, in the development of commercial aviation, and in increased agricultural output to build a dense observation network, whose data helped yield a new paradigm for meteorology.

Conclusion

The first weather forecasts in the United States that were based on a large network of simultaneous observations provided information to society that was much more valuable than the cost of production. There was discussion in the early winter of 1870 between the scientist Increase Lapham and a businessman in Chicago of the feasibility of establishing a private forecasting organization in Wisconsin or Illinois (see Craft 1999). But previous attempts by private organizations in the United States had been unsuccessful in supporting any private weather-forecasting service. In the contemporary United States, the Federal government both collects data and offers forecasts, while private weather organizations provide a variety of customized services.

Weather Forecasting Timeline

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