Today's Reading
Ours was merely one phase of the Summer MONEX; earlier, there had been a two-month field experiment in the Arabian Sea. Scientists who had participated in the Winter MONEX in the South China Sea were already back at their home institutions attempting to wring meaning from the cache of data they had collected.
Incredibly, MONEX was just one of a half dozen regional experiments happening under the banner of 1979's Global Weather Experiment, an unprecedented effort to collect atmospheric and oceanic observations from around the world to improve the burgeoning field of numerical weather prediction. As ever-smarter supercomputers were giving humans the capacity to make millions of complicated calculations in mere seconds, we desperately needed a better understanding of the science behind those calculations—the interactions between air pressure, wind, mountains, humidity, radiation from the sun, cloud cover, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and so on—not to mention the numbers to plug into them, vast tomes of data from places we had never collected it, such as the sky over the Bay of Bengal during the summer monsoon.
As the Electra shook with a sudden gust of wind, I gazed into the heart of the storm, hoping mightily that the plane, its passengers, and all this precious data would make it safely to the ground.
In 1961, a newly elected President Kennedy approached his science adviser, a man named Jerome Wiesner, and asked him for advice about his upcoming talk at the United Nations. Kennedy was looking for a flashy new project to propose, a scientific endeavor that could bring the world together at the height of Cold War tensions. Earlier in the year he had announced to Congress that the United States would send a man to the moon before the decade was over. Now he wanted to propose a similar challenge to his counterparts at the UN, something that would inspire cooperation and unity during a time of mistrust and deep division.
Wiesner, an electrical engineer who had made a name for himself developing microwave radar at MIT (he would later go on to serve as that institution's president), polled his colleagues at the university. What pressing scientific needs should mankind address next? he wanted to know. His friend Jule Charney had an idea—a global weather experiment. Every day for one year, people all over the world would take as many detailed observations of the weather as possible, using existing infrastructure like the weather stations humans had been building for centuries but also deploying new instruments to farther reaches than ever before.
At the time, Charney was in the midst of revolutionizing the field of meteorology. Instead of making weather predictions based on what had happened in the past, as scientists had done for years, Charney produced weather forecasts using only a supercomputer, the laws of physics, and initial conditions—that is, the atmospheric conditions at this very moment. The initial conditions of today are almost entirely responsible for the weather tomorrow and the day after that. But in 1961—before satellites began orbiting the globe and before many countries had invested in legitimate weather services—gathering those vital numbers was still a challenge. Charney envisioned this global weather experiment as a scientific marathon that would demonstrate that more observations and more accurate initial conditions enhanced supercomputer-derived weather forecasts. An effort like this would not only improve countless lives around the planet but also remind the world that despite cultural and political divides, humankind had more commonalities than differences. We all lived under the same sky, after all.
Wiesner knew a good idea when he heard one and on September 25, 1961, after calling for the creation of a UN peacekeeping force and a ban on tests of nuclear weapons, Kennedy proposed "further cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control."
In the years after Kennedy's speech, the UN's World Meteorological Organization began planning the Global Weather Experiment, which also became known as the Charney experiment.
The ambitious initiative took nearly two decades to organize. In that time, virtually every country on earth invested in more or better weather-observing technology. To fill the large gaps that existed in monitoring the oceans, scientists deployed weather buoys from boats and airplanes. Commercial ships were fitted with meteorological instruments, and forty research vessels were stationed in equatorial waters. Hundreds of upper-air stations readied radiosondes to send aloft. Two geostationary meteorological satellites were placed in fixed positions around the Earth, and several polar-orbiting satellites began circling the planet at a height of about eight hundred kilometers. Thousands of scientists and institutions were recruited to record, read, and analyze the data.
By the beginning of 1979, the whole world was equipped to observe the actual weather from pole to pole, to watch in real time as the conditions of today turned into the conditions of tomorrow with fewer gaps and fewer guesses than ever before, forever enhancing our understanding of the complex systems that swirl around the globe and cause the weather that greets us every morning at our front doors.
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