(KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was the first to broadcast news and weather information in 1920. The first commercial radio station in the U.S.

KDKA broadcast news and weather information that could be heard by the public. was KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which launched on November 2, 1920. In times of frosts or approaching storms, the information is of inestimable value to farmers and growers.” Root had this to say about the future of weather communication: “I believe that wireless will, in the future, be the method of distributing weather forecasts. Weather Bureau in Springfield, Illinois.Ī forward thinker, Mr. The transmission was received across most of the state and was supplied by Clarence Root, a meteorologist and the Director of the U.S. This is true both with the scientific advances of meteorology itself, and the way that information is communicated to the consumer over the airwaves.Īccording to , the first weather report was a test transmitted by “wireless telegraphy” from Illiopolis, Illinois, in April of 1915.

As you can imagine, this process was exceedingly time consuming and these skilled workers were in high demand as the number of weather stations and timing of observations increased exponentially.The evolution of broadcast meteorology has worked hand in hand with advances in technology. Houze points out in his article, there were four key jobs which were necessary to make a weather forecast back in the early and mid twentieth century: observers who would transmit weather data, plotters who would receive coded weather observations and plot them on a map, analysts who would draw contours and note the locations of fronts and high and low pressure systems, and forecasters, who would use these manually generated maps to actually make a weather forecast. In order to be able to process the vast amount of data that existed even back in the 'old days' before automated weather stations and computer models, it was necessary to form a convention by which the meteorological information could be displayed visually on a map and easily interpreted with the human eye. Even just plotting these variables on a map is quite an undertaking. One of the things that makes meteorology such a complex science is the huge number of variables which must be considered. These often include temperature, dew point (a measure of humidity), wind speed, wind direction, present weather, barometric pressure and pressure tendency (is it rising or falling?), cloud cover, and many others. Courtesy: NOAA/WPC.Īt any surface weather observing station, a multitude of parameters are recorded and reported every hour, if not more frequently. Surface analysis at 7:00 AM on Ma(the Blizzard of 1993). Actually, looking at data on weather maps and figuring out what it means is STILL one of my favorite parts of my job today!

In that class, we did a lot of hands-on work plotting weather maps, which was something I really enjoyed. For me, that light at the end of the tunnel was an introductory weather and forecasting class which I took during the spring semester of my sophomore year. Thus, it is very easy to get bogged down in all of the prerequisites and lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel- learning about the science of weather that drove you into those classes in the first place. As an applied science, meteorology has a lot of core class requirements, including calculus and differential equations, physics, and chemistry. I will never forget one of the first times I felt as an undergraduate that I had really arrived at the point where I was learning 'real meteorology'. Robert Houze of the University of Washington, and his daughter, Rebecca Houze. This post was inspired by a fantastic article which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) in December 2019 by Dr.

Meteorologist map coloring