The Discovery of Weather

the long version

In the mid-nineteenth century, the new science of weather forecasting was fraught with controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, a bitter dispute about the nature of storms had raged for decades, and forecasting was hampered by turf wars then halted by the Civil War. Forecasters in England struggled with the scientific establishment for recognition and vied with astrologers and other charlatans for public acceptance. One of the voices in this struggle was Stephen Saxby, a British naval instructor who thought he had found a sure-fire way of forecasting storms. He championed a popular but somewhat eccentric theory that weather disturbances are linked to stages in the moon's orbit of the earth. In this book, the author traces the early days of weather forecasting, the background to Saxby's prediction, and the drama of the storm itself.